


Your Life Worth Walking on a Bright Morning

by HelloAmHere



Series: The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep [3]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Angst, Fluff and Angst, Found Families, Full Shift Werewolves, Hurt/Comfort, Implied past emotional neglect, Loneliness, M/M, Slow Burn, Slow Everything, Telepathy, people getting hurt because they're not communicating properly, people not communicating properly, what up doctor steve welcome to this universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2019-02-19
Packaged: 2019-05-30 05:27:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 24,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15089978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HelloAmHere/pseuds/HelloAmHere
Summary: For all its complexity, Louis sometimes reminded himself, life could always be simplified into a series of forks in the road. Even overwhelmingly big things were survivable when you broke them down to their choice. One path or the other, left or right.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This piece is the third in a series of interlocking short stories (I'm planning four total!), with You're Never Alone... being the first. They're sequential, but overlapping, so they'll tell a few of the same scenes from multiple POV. Best read together, if you like!
> 
> Feel free to hit me up [on my tumblr](http://helloamhere.tumblr.com/) re: fic, writing, etc!
> 
> This first chapter especially retells scenes from the previous ("Believe Me..."), so it's probably confusing unless you're tracking well between them.

 

 

> “Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.” - Erich Fromm

Before the inn, Louis hadn’t had much of a vocabulary for things he wanted. Some word to define what it meant to soothe the sensations in his head. _Quiet_ , perhaps. It was too loud even though it was always only just him, talking to himself. He couldn’t ever really shut up in his own head.

Before the inn, Louis hadn’t had a destination. He only had a place he couldn’t be anymore. He’d been moving on instinct because there hadn't been much else, shoving his warmest clothes into a bag and hopping the train out of the city. It had meant leaving the first place he’d ever managed to afford, which was a quiet agony that Louis didn’t know how to look at directly.

But he couldn’t keep pretending that it was working. Not for the wolf, and because the wolf was always with him (was, maybe, _him,_ but Louis wasn’t going to say that, not even to himself, not where the wolf might hear it), not for him. Not for _them._ Whatever. The wolf was scratching on the inside, whining in his head, and all that Louis could translate from that raw and spiraling feeling was _go._ He’d worked so hard to hold it all in, and he’d lost anyway, and that was just life.

Once you know things have to change it’s stupid to waste energy caring, and Louis didn’t have a lot left to waste. It hadn’t been quiet, anyway. It had only been a sort-of apartment stuffed into the third floor corner of a building subdivided within zoning regulations by the skin of its teeth. Louis’ one room had hugged a brick-and-broken corner underneath the pedestrian walkway over train tracks.

That made it sound quaint: PEDESTRIAN WALKWAY in curly letters faded to grey, _what a dumb name_ , Louis had thought every time he passed it. Like you might promenade there with a date in the evening and lean out over the railing, aware that the setting sun was striking your profile in a fetching way. It wasn’t quaint. Nobody took walks there. The only people who used it were the kids who did deals over unexciting drugs, naive kids too young to know how visible they were, skinny arms and legs poking out of baggy hoodies, silhouetted on the sky and talking louder than they wanted to, for show. When they got older they moved to the lower street corners. If they got older.

Louis, who'd managed to get older, told himself he didn't miss the pedestrian walkway and its idiot sign. He didn't miss it staring out the train windows as the buildings got shorter and further apart, and then he didn't miss it as they vanished entirely into loam banks around the tracks. It was a stupid, dangerous, cramped place to miss. Just another thing the wolf had decided would be impossible, train whistles that made Louis twist awake in the night, strange alarm ringing in his ears. The wolf wanted the woods. There weren’t _jobs_ in the _woods,_ Louis had tried to tell it, but the wolf never listened to him. They had a mutual arrangement that way.

Before the inn, the only words that had come to mind for what came next were...not that helpful. Halting, uncertain, like foggy shapes hidden behind the clamor of what-are-you-going-to-eat and what-if-the-wolf-comes-back and where-will-you-go-when-it-does.

_Quiet._

_Away._

_Different._

_Safe._

In the rare moments he felt ambitious, _someone to talk to._

*** 

For all its complexity, Louis sometimes reminded himself, life could always be simplified into a series of forks in the road. Even overwhelmingly big things were survivable when you broke them down to their choice. One path or the other, left or right.

For instance: which door to go through on the bright morning after the strangest night of your life?

Louis woke up in a thick comforter on somebody else’s bed. The bed felt rumpled and lived-in, smelled like comfort. Louis was disturbingly at ease considering that for the first few minutes, he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there.

Start with the basics. He was human, which was always a nice thing to find the morning after a full moon. Human-shaped, anyway. He was warm, actually too warm, which was delightful for its sheer novelty. He was sleep-messy with a thick tongue-feeling and sand in the corners of his eyes. The comforter had little white Elk figures printed on it, so it was a good bet that he was back in that ridiculous, rustic inn. The walls were a deep, grainy wood, and there was a big window looking out into white clouds. Louis watched them drift for the space of a few breaths, huge winter clouds in the sky.

Louis flexed his hands out in front of his face. They were stiff from hours of holding tight fists under his chin and against his cheek. There was something foggy in his head, like he’d slept too deeply and a vague memory of being sick last night, but not…it didn’t seem to have lasted. In the curving sides of his organs, everything felt settled and peaceful. The wolf was—something. The wolf was _happy._

Louis shook the wolf out of his head and looked around its corners for his analytical, verbal brain again, because _he was human and the moon was over._  He picked at the long red sleeve on one wrist-- _shit_ \--Harry, that’s where he was. Harry, who was a wolf, who lived with other wolves in this inn at the end of the world. Running through the woods speaking in tongues—his brain woke up with a racing panic.

Louis was out of the bed and on his feet, carried by an instinct that wasn’t the wolf, but probably went just as deep. _They know_. He’d nearly gone through the door, heart racing, when the rest of him caught up.

_They'll sell you to the circus if they find out._

No, these were others. _Other wolves._

He wasn't alone anymore. It was… It was terrifying and yet also everything he wanted, like a crash landing. Like coming to the surface after a life underwater. He felt dizzy and pressed in and panicking, even though his wolf was suspiciously quiet. _The one time I could use you telling me what to do,_ Louis thought, ruefully.

 _Tell me what to do._ Harry had been a human and then he’d been a wolf and through all of it he’d been a _mind like us,_ warm beyond Louis’ imagining and vibrant beyond his experience. They ran together in the woods and Louis had been so certain as a wolf, that he belonged.

All right then. One choice at a time. Louis breathed, and grounded his bare feet on the carpet, cold but real _._ The dizziness faded to a manageable buzz. He was in pack-cache clothes ( _pack, what the_ fuck—wolves had packs.  _We should have a pack,_ the wolf yawled, world's least helpful sidekick _\--_ Louis wheeled the thoughts back. Carpet. Floor). Had he been wearing shoes when he’d transformed? He didn’t think so. Had he left a scratch-mark trail down the wooden hallway of the inn? _Other. Wolves. Fuck._

Louis looked back at the bed, at the room. Harry had a rough-hewn desk in the corner, underneath the right side of the window so that it caught the morning light. There were a few notebooks piled up on the desk, a laptop with stickers on it, and there was a guitar in the corner. It looked normal, based on what Louis had seen in tv shows and advertisements, in the sets they used to depict other people's bedrooms.

Louis had lived in Harry’s mind for hours in the night and he could still remember the shape of it, feeling like this room: complicated and reaching and hopeful. Or at least, welcoming in a way that Louis didn’t even know what to do with.

Other wolves were a thing and so was fucking _mind reading._ Louis had taken a train straight into a fantasy book, into a movie, into a nothing-makes-sense-land where whatever he was, was normal _._

Louis had no idea what to do. He hated mess, though, so he made the bed, and then he went through the door.

***

It was calm downstairs and there were neither wolves nor vampires. Small blessings. Louis walked down a carpeted hallway, somehow already lost in the big inn, wondering where his rented room was, hoping to retrieve at least his books before he bolted. It was still a captivating place, full of nooks and crannies, and deceptively mazelike. The wolf liked the way that it smelled and felt, which made sense now that he knew. Louis thought about the sense that he’d gotten from Harry’s mind about all the others. A lot of them, he thought, whatever a pack was. The place where the guests stayed was in the front of the building, cut off from the homey interior. There was no sign of Harry. He pushed through a dividing door with a glass panel to find more doors. Louis sighed. Life was ever having to open doors without knowing what was behind them.

At the end of this hallway was the kitchen on one side, and on the other, a backdoor door. Still no Harry waiting to confront him (or _trap us_ , hissed that familiarly vicious part of Louis’ brain). Louis moved toward the chill in his bare feet and looked through the window to the outside. Freezing out there, so cold the glass corners were frosted in long and spidering lines of ice. It looked too precise to be from nature, like a stencil, like lace.

“It’s gonna snow,” said the boy on the stairs behind him. Louis spun around. The boy leaned back on his elbows and raised a hand, palm up in a universal symbol of nonthreat.

“In about two minutes, it’ll start snowing and it won’t stop for the next few hours at least. They’re saying it’ll ice tonight, and that might actually shut the trains down, especially given the holiday.”

The boy nodded at Louis, like this was the continuation of a conversation they’d already been having. Was he a wolf, too? Louis stared at his face, and the boy smiled without showing teeth. Good bet.

“Merry Christmas,” the boy said.

“Harry brought me…back in,” Louis said. “I’m a guest. Harry knows me. I’ve got a room.”

The boy nodded again. “Smelled it, and Harry,” he said, offhandedly, still smiling, smile turned a little wry. “You smell a _lot_ like Haz, don’t worry. Don't worry, no one's going to jump you on Christmas, even without Harry all over you like a throw rug.”

Louis bit his lip as a substitute for saying something. He understood about half of what this stranger had said, and the wolf didn’t know anything other than _I think we’re being rude._ Well, fuck, not like there was a reference manual for wolf introductions. Was there? He was up against the door, the cold weight of it in his back. He could push it open and be gone, in a second, if the boy rushed him.

The boy stood up. Despite the fact that he looked Louis’ age, he was wearing long onesie pajamas with little tiny Rudolph figures on them, red sparkly noses. So he must live here too, if unembarrassed rustic garb were shibboleth to this mysterious pack that Louis had blindly wandered into.

“Your room’s the third one on the right down there, stuff's all safe. We’ve got a truck, if you need a ride to the station. I’m going to make eggs though, so come join me for breakfast first, yeah?”

The boy was walking down the hallway now, far to the left side, angling toward the kitchen door. He smelled like the woods, the undergrowth in rain, the earth under moonlight. Louis trusted that despite his better judgement. Or maybe it was the pack trust that had flooded into his mind from Harry's last night. So many things that Harry believed in, that he seemed to think Louis should, too.

“Gotta eat, Harry’s guest,” the boy said, head over to the side. He looked like nothing other than a human boy, and yet there was something very labrador about the motion, playful and twitchy. 

His own wolf, awake at last, stirred inquisitively. Out from the bliss of the full moon and into the shock of a cold morning and very unhappy at the thought that none of this was his. Louis gritted his teeth and pushed it down.

“Um,” Louis said, “Breakfast?”

“That’s what I like to hear,” the boy said. He didn’t make a move toward Louis, not to take his hand or stare into his face, for which Louis was grateful. He just walked through the kitchen door and left it open. Louis could see the shape of food, bags of it on the table near the stove, and the tall stool he’d sat on the night before, watching Harry.

“I’m Niall,” the boy said, not looking at Louis. Wolves didn't turn their backs by accident.

Louis chose a door. What else could you do?

 

*** 

 

It had been the best Christmas. The best Christmas Louis had ever had, certainly, maybe it had even been the best _day_ he’d ever had. It wasn’t even because he’d gotten to eat so much (although he had to admit, that was part of it). It was what it felt like to be around them: to laugh, to make them laugh sometimes, to catch a string of the conversation and give it a pull and have it matter. Liam and Zayn and Niall--and most of all, _Harry,_ who smelled like pine and stardust, who’d caught Louis up against the doorway and righted the whole world--Louis had never had such a good day. 

But now it was night and Louis was alone, walking to a train station to go anywhere else, he didn’t know where. So all in all, a pretty typical holiday ending. And his body was shaking a little, a current under his skin longing to collapse, to fall down right there and grind his jawbone and the side of his skull into the dirt of the road and the territory, but if there was one thing that Louis was good at, it was moving past the fucking _wolf._

“You found out everything that you could, and you’re leaving before the wolf gets stupid, before it hurts,” Louis said, to the lingering little snowflakes drifting around him. It was a lie, and he knew it was a lie because he was telling it to himself, but what else was new?

The last thing he needed was a magical leash he didn’t understand. The last thing Harry—or, the pack—needed was a broken wolf who couldn’t be controlled, and Louis had made a life out of moving fast enough to brush people by without their noticing. The last time he’d tried to put the wolf on a leash, well. 

Maybe it was even true. Louis didn’t know. Everything got so mixed up when you only had yourself to talk to.

His steps crunched, and occasionally sloshed, through new snow and melting drifts. Harry would be aghast at the state of his feet. His toes were soaked already but he could probably wrap them up in his second pair of jeans on the train and the jeans wouldn’t be too damp after that, not bad enough to stink up the rest of his bag. Or if it did he’d deal with it. He’d deal with it.

He felt the woods on his right, even across the fields. It was almost like a person watching over his shoulder. Territory, they’d said. Liam had said it was a  _pack bond._ Louis didn’t mean to, but he felt his mouth deform into a snarl.

He wasn’t going to look at the woods. It felt like it was looking at him, he wasn’t going to look back.

He looked. And it made him catch his breath—the trees were heavy with snow, a thick icing so perfect it looked like something in a movie. Louis had never seen snow on a real, wild forest. He could almost feel it under his paws, the ferocious cold sending a thrill up the strong bones of his forelegs. They could frolic in snow like that, burrow around, be ridiculous together. Run and run and run. Kings and queens of the snow on four legs.

“It's not real, not for you,” Louis said out loud to himself, outraged, “You’re losing your shit. Good thing we’re leaving.”

The woods were silent and accusatory and then, _something else,_ a different woods, different smell, different _home_. Once upon a time, a tiny Louis had fallen in love with a tiny grove of trees and visited them every single day, in a tiny blue parka. Some days there had been wolves, brushing up against him, nosing at the trees. Louis could feel the phantom whisk of their fur under his own hands, little kid hands with hangnails and stubby fingers, always grimy.

There was a gust of wind, sharp ice on the edge of it, and Louis was looking back at Harry’s woods again.

He’d never remembered that before. He'd never remembered wolves. He’d never remembered others.

“What the fuck,” Louis whispered. But there was no one around to hear.

 

***

 

He hadn’t expected the truck, Harry’s face looking more determined than Louis had seen anything look, and the spike in his own instincts that wanted to tell him Harry was _pack_ and something was _wrong_. He hadn’t expected to be blinking tears out of the corners of his own eyes when Harry pulled up to the train station in a flurry of motion, hadn’t expected to sit frozen and think, _oh, thank you, come get me, take me back._

Harry brought tupperware _._ Louis could see it in the duffel bag, stacks of cloudy plastic full of food, and tucked in around sweaters and goodness knew what else. He was all limbs falling out of the truck, dragging too much stuff behind him, hair all over his forehead.

“It's got a second layer you can take off, makes a lighter coat when it gets warmer,” Harry said. Was that—were those sweaters? Louis felt like he was breaking out in goosebumps all over, gaping at Harry.

“The bottom one is mostly rice and veggies, it'll last, so eat the top ones first,” Harry said.

“Harry,” Louis managed. He didn’t even know what came next. _It’s too late for me, Harry? You don’t know what you’re asking?_ Harry was here but he wasn’t forcing anything, wasn’t angry, wasn't trying to pin him down. Louis rather wished he would, if only to make it all easier. 

“Liam is a fan of complex grains and protein supplements, it’ll be good for you, wolves need more protein, Liam says you haven’t been having enough,” Harry said. He was looking at the food like it had insulted him and Gemma and his mother. Louis didn’t know him well enough to puzzle out what any of this meant.

“I don’t know if you even like complex grains, but I figured, food is food. And there’s a first aid kit, too, from the lounge. It’s probably old but like, hopefully it’s still valid.”

“Harry,” Louis tried again, louder.

“When you get back to the city, I wrote down the name of the guy Gemma uses for our regional trades, he might have a lead on a job, or something, he's friendly, you can at least try--it’s not the same, but, even just, being around other wolves once in a while is still really important.” Harry had brought him food in tiny little tupperwares. Louis had never actually had a tupperware before. It shouldn’t be the thing that changed everything, but it was.  

“Harry,” Louis said. It was shaky now, and Harry must be able to hear that. 

“I don’t want you to go,” Harry said, his stupidly clear eyes so pleading in the yellow light of the train station, his cheeks red with cold. It was all the wooden warmth of the inn and the light in the kitchen and somebody baking cookies for a stranger. Louis hadn’t expected any of this, and the wolf _wanted,_ and he couldn’t keep it all separate, not this time.

Louis found himself up on his feet and crowding into Harry’s body, kissing him.

 _I don’t want you to go_ echoed in his head, and somehow it made it ok, the wanting and the panic and the sliding over the slush and snow to get to Harry. The kiss was deep, urgent before Louis could stop himself, Harry falling into him like they were releasing a tension they’d hated to hold. It was sharp and intense, kissing like Harry was about to lose him and Harry was going to try and get as much out of it as he possibly could before that happened. Louis didn’t go anywhere, _obviously,_ he was squeezed up close to Harry’s chest and doing his level best to not think at all.

Louis’ mind was still a flurry of winter through the trees, the sharp pitch of the nighttime temperature dropping into the dark, but Harry was so alive and so real and so very important. Louis wasn’t ready to stay, but he couldn’t go, not like this. Not when there were still so many questions left to ask. 

“Ok,” Louis said, gasping, real words still still drowned against the press of Harry’s mouth, the taste of his tongue rattling everything inside Louis’ head. The wolf was curling and pacing and jumping and, thank the moon, invisible. His fingers were hooking into the thin fabric of Harry’s sleeves. He must be cold, because he’d thrown his coat at Louis. 

“Ok, what?” Harry asked. He looked dazed, startled, even more wide-eyed than usual. Louis just barely stopped himself from reaching out to touch his face again.

“Ok, I won’t go,” Louis lied.


	2. Chapter 2

**H.**  
  
“So you got him back,” Gemma said, coming in without knocking and sitting down on the edge of Harry’s bed.

Harry sighed, and refrained from pointing out that he could’ve been doing _anything_ in here, because it would probably start Gemma down a longer path of speculating on what exactly _anything_ might be and nobody needed a repeat of two summers ago, when Gemma had first become lead and had been antsy and dictatorial enough to throw Harry’s eastern pack fling right out of the inn at four o’clock in the morning.

In truth, anything had been: 1) fidgeting with pillows and trying to pick up on Louis’ near-sleep telepathy through the walls, which was weird and probably invasive but he couldn’t help it 2) counting squirrels running through a metaphorical underbrush and not getting any sleepier from it 3) considering the probably-also-bad plan of wolfing out and going for a quick gallop into the woods, just for an hour or so, even though it would just mean exhaustion tomorrow. Even more exhaustion.

They needed one of Steve’s compounds and a movie marathon session in the lounge. They needed baking, and maybe a long run through the snow, snapping at icicles. They needed a lazy day at the pond, which was finally frozen thick enough for skating. Louis needed all the years that Harry had gotten.

“Hey,” Gemma said, tugging at the blanket, “You with me?”   

Harry blinked. It was slippery, Louis’ telepathy, and it was distracting even when Louis’ thoughts were thickening into nonsense, and, gratifyingly, _healing_. Sleep was good. Harry felt his back muscles relaxing in sympathy.

“Yep,” Harry said. “Only with you, Gems.”

“Louis tried to leave tonight,” Gemma said quietly. It wasn’t really a question, and she wasn’t really looking at him, which was how Harry knew that this was hitting her hard.

“Yeah, but he didn’t, he came back,” Harry said, first instinct to reassure. He rather wished Gemma would reassure _him, he_ was the one who’d had to rush out with his heart beating out his throat to try and find that tiny, ridiculous, all-too-fragile, all-too-stubborn _mystery_ of a wolf. But such was the lot of being the only sibling of the pack lead, and Harry could project certainty when the people around him required it.

“He’s asleep,” Harry said, definitively. All the best things in the world came from getting more sleep or more food or more wolf runs or more kisses and hey. Harry’s track record at providing those for Louis was pretty good and it had only been a _day._

“His very first day with a real pack, and apparently it was so bad he _fled,”_ Gemma shot back.  

“He didn’t want to leave, he just thought…I don’t know what he thought,” Harry said weakly, which was the worst sort of a lie, and yet sort of not a lie, and all of it making his head ache. He didn’t know if he had the right to feel something like a headache over it, when his entire life compared felt like a joke, how lucky he’d been.

It was written all over Louis’ mind even now, even with the sleep-fade on the telepathy that Harry could still sense in the air. He’d been hurting so much it had been physical, pulled to the woods, pulled by his own fears. It was all Harry could do to stay in his bedroom and not curl up with Louis right now, hold him down, hold him safe.

Harry rubbed his hands over his ears and down his neck and told himself that Louis was _here._ That was step one.

“Yeah, don’t get the sense that wolf always lets himself do what he _wants._ But thank the moon he trusts you, and you’ve been able to stay sensible,” Gemma said, still looking at the wall in Harry’s bedroom like it was gonna reveal an instruction booklet for lone wolves.

Harry tried to look as innocent as possible despite the phantom, imaginary taste of _Louis Louis Louis_ still on his mouth. He chewed his bottom lip, which did not help. He let it go, and folded his hands in his lap, and waited for Gemma to stop frowning into the wall.

“I need your help on this one. I need all the boys, but I really need you, you know?” she said eventually.

“Always, Gems,” Harry said. He leaned forward in the bed and put his forehead on the back of her shoulder, a playful nudge and a good reminder. He was her bratty, dependable little brother, and she was never getting rid of him. She was always gonna have his help.

Gemma drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them in close. Harry could smell her concern. It ran underneath the entire pack right now, like a shifting in the ground. Neither bad nor good, but concerning. Louis was a lone wolf and lone wolves were unstable, and the pack was built for _belonging._  

“We have to do this carefully,” she said, “We can’t scare him away, you know? He’s not the same as Zayn.”

“Zayn was different. Louis doesn’t feel like that, I know,” Harry said softly. Gemma nodded.

Zayn had felt...like a lightning strike to the pack, heated but fast, the shivering bolts of his telepathy almost painful the first months they’d run together. Zayn had been antsy and irritable and snappy, had needed to take a bedroom a full floor down from the rest of the boys, and everyone had walked on eggshells around him, when he’d been new. But it had been something they’d understood, even if it had been uncomfortable. He’d been lost, abandoned when he should’ve been found, and that needed healing and it deserved anger. Zayn had still fallen into the woods and the wolves and the running, and by the end of the first month, he’d been pack. He’d adapted and they’d adapted around him, and Zayn was just as much family as Niall, or Gemma, or anyone.

Louis, in contrast, didn’t feel _angry._ Even his mysterious telepathy wasn’t pointed, was diffuse and seeking and quiet, and only Harry could touch it. He was undoubtedly a wolf but so much of it felt  _buried,_ and Harry had no idea how the pack was supposed to draw it out of him. _If_ they were supposed to draw it out.

“Louis almost ran away tonight, even though he’s starving and has no place to go, even though the woods are already pulling him, even though he looks at you like you’re some kind of rockstar. It might be harder than it seems,” Gemma said. Harry shrugged, but nodded, moving his head against her shoulder. He was here either way.

“He stayed,” Harry said. He worried into his bottom lip just to feel the reassuring ceramic of his teeth. 

“Yeah,” Gemma said, “Time is on our side. But you can’t stress him, Harry. We can’t tangle up all the instincts, ok? I need him to feel safe, I need him to feel like this could be home, with or without something between the two of you. And we need to know what’s going on with his wolf.” 

It made a lot of sense. Harry agreed with it but he still felt a rising sense of frustration, a whine that would’ve come out in wolf form, unhappy and a little petulant. He felt embarrassed and young and chastised, and he _wasn’t_ a kid and he wasn’t stupid. He was the one that Louis was connecting with, the one that Louis was trusting. He couldn’t control the fact that Louis was also beautiful and intriguing and funny in his head, that Louis needed to figure out an entire new universe and that Harry happened to be right in the middle of the universe they were offering him.

“Nothing’s going on with his wolf, it just hasn’t had any room,” Harry said, in lieu of anything else, and if the corner of his mouth showed some teeth, well, Gemma was facing away from him.

“Sure,” Gemma said, sounding deeply skeptical. 

“I get—look, the thing is that he trusts me. I hear you but, I would never—let me show him it’s ok to let it out. I can do this, Gemma.”

Gemma huffed a growling breath into the air, a little nasal, acquiescent and teasing. 

“You know there’s no less threatening wolf than you, Hazza. But I’m serious, be careful, ok? He didn’t grow up like us. Stop flirting. Be patient.”

“All _right_ , I _get_ it,” Harry said. Honestly—Gemma was all that was good but she had to be lead _._ Sisters couldn’t understand the destiny of love and starlight, after all, couldn’t feel what it felt to be the one mind that Louis kept broadcasting to, a kaleidoscope of need and thoughts and wit and silliness and such, such longing. Harry wanted and his wolf wanted and they were always in agreement, always in conspiracy, even if it meant going undercover against his own sister. She’d understand eventually, when it was obvious how right it all was, how much it was meant to be.

After Gemma left, Harry stared at the ceiling, tracing the familiar wood planks in the near-dark. Whatever it was that had brought Louis to the inn, whatever it was that made him telepathic all the time but unable to shift forms, the most and the least wolf out of anyone Harry had ever met--it pulled at the fibers of Harry’s mind, stuck and repeating.

 

**L.**

 

Gemma announced the morning by knocking on the door and coming in two mugs of tea. Louis didn’t know how she knocked on the door with both fists full, and was left to conclude that she had superpowers. 

“Yo,” Gemma said, pushing in. She was in soft brown corduroys and a lace red shirt over a tank top—everything that everybody wore here looked so nice, thick and new and none of the threaded patches that Louis’ clothes all seemed to get in a matter of weeks.

Louis didn’t say anything, because Gemma was still an unpredictable force, and he had no idea what ‘ _yo_ ’ required as a response. He wasn’t totally sure what a pack lead required either, but his wolf was being jumpy about it.  

“Good morning,” Gemma said, sitting down in the tiny blue armchair next to Louis’ bed, and handing him the second mug. The chair was childsize, leftover from somebody’s childhood bedroom, and Gemma sank an absurd amount down to the floor and grinned up at him. Louis’ wolf relaxed by a fraction. 

Louis took the mug politely. It was tea, just tea. He sniffed it and felt a little more awake. It was strong and black and only very faintly sweetened, as tea should be. He was pretty sure his hair was sticking straight up. He’d slept in, if the light through the window was anything to go by. He felt groggy but better in some profound way, rested all the way through his core. He’d dreamed, in an intangible haze, about trees and stars and sloping hills covered in brush.

“So the thing I have to say first is that you can always leave, no matter what faces Harry makes at you,” Gemma said.

“Um, Harry’s faces are nice,” Louis said, clearing his throat.

“You're the only one who thinks that, but ok,” Gemma said. “The second thing I have to say is, you’d be an idiot to leave the pack right now, buddy. You really need to get your wolf sorted. That doesn’t mean you have to join us, and I’m sorry if I spooked you with the talk about voting you in.”

“My wolf isn’t going to be a problem,” Louis said quickly. Gemma held his gaze for a beat and Louis looked steadily back, trying to convey stability and knowingness and all of the things that he wasn't. 

 _You're a liar,_ the wolf said helpfully. Louis’ free hand was still underneath the sheet, and he flipped his fingernails edge-side into the thigh. _You're not like them,_ Louis thought back.

“I'm careful,” Louis said. He’d been working so hard at it. He’d gotten himself far from the city, alone. He'd changed and there hadn't been any humans at all.

Somewhere in his brainstem, the wolf said _stay._

“Your wolf is absolutely not a problem,” Gemma said. Which wasn't exactly what Louis had meant but Gemma didn't have the tone of someone you corrected.

“What I mean is, you need some looking after. Let us do that, ok? Give us at least a month. Feel the territory under your paws, you know? Harry says you don’t transform on your own. Our pack doctor would like to chat about it.”

“Umm,” Louis said.

“Cool? Cool,” Gemma said.

She drank tea. He drank tea. Gemma had a kind of big-sister aura that Louis was clearly susceptible to despite the fact that he didn’t have any sisters. Even the little approving smirk she made as he drank the tea was making him feel warm inside. Shit. Two nights in this place and he was already weak for them all.

“You already know Harry would be so broken up if you left,” she said conspiratorially, and that was very big sister. Louis turned hot and tried to look like he didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Please,” Gemma said, like she could read his mind. Thank _god_ that was only a thing when they were in wolf form. 

“I know my bro. Don’t mind him, unless, you know, you want to. Anyway, I had a think after you tried to run away again—“

Louis made an involuntary protesting noise, which Gemma ignored. She was really like Harry that way.

“And I realized, it was a bad lead call to act like you had to join our pack immediately, the day after you got here. Of course you need time, I'm sorry. There are others, did you know that? There are three big packs in this area, and more besides that. But your wolf is clearly drawn to these woods, so I think it’s one of our packs. But that doesn’t have to mean us.”

This was all way, way too much to argue about, flying around Louis’ head like buzzing insects. _We're different, we don't get a pack,_ he shot to the wolf, just in case. But time, he had time. And by the time he was gone it wouldn't matter, and right now he could…drink tea. He clutched it between the palms of his hands, and Gemma stretched her long legs out from the childsize chair, and considered the window, frosted with miniature snowdrifts on the ledge outside.

“All this wolf stuff will start to make sense soon,” Gemma said. “I promise.”

“I felt something, out there, from the woods. Like a memory.” Louis said. Gemma looked at him, but he didn’t know how to elaborate. 

“You don’t remember anything about your childhood, do you?” she asked. Soft, this time, and that definitely sounded like Harry.

Louis didn’t usually tell people the truth about what he remembered and what he didn’t. But Gemma was lead, so.

“I remember flashes. Not many, in a long time. But new ones, in the last few days. I have no idea what it means,” he said. 

Gemma tapped the mug against her chin, steam weaving under her nose.

“I don’t either,” she said at last. “More for the pack doc, Louis. It’s gonna be ok.” 

Louis shrugged. His past didn’t scare him. It had always been there, a grey opaque curtain behind him. It was more the future that was the concern.

“So. You run with the pack before you make any decisions, and you'll meet the Eastern pack soon,” Gemma said, “It’ll make a lot more things feel clear. Unfortunately we can’t know what territory your wolf wants until you are a wolf and if that only happens at the moon, then…”

“I’ll stay. A while,” Louis said, cautious of promises, even if he was probably never going to be able to convince these eager, naive wolves of the truth about the teeth and claws hiding inside his body, or just too much a coward to try. “I already told Harry.”

“I know,” Gemma sniffed, “Because he didn’t come crawling into my bed last night to cry. I owe you for that. Now grab a shower, because you know what comes after Christmas?”

In Louis’ experience Christmas was a rushed two-week space with a few more shifts and a lot of headaches. Christmas was plastic green stuff doused in horrible chemicals, worse food in the garbage because of all the desserts and cream, a whole lot of people trailing the human cortisol stress smells that made his nose bristle. Louis scratched his ear, and looked into the tea, and looked back at Gemma.

“Cleanup?” He ventured.

“Oh, buddy,” Gemma said, _big sister_ laughter in every syllable. Louis knew he shouldn’t but it still made him smile. “Sales come after Christmas!”

 

***

 

Shopping was a very unpleasant experience.

Not because of the village nor because of Gemma, who took them into town in her car, which was shockingly red and purred very nicely even through the slush, not the kind of car that Louis imagined anyone would have out here. 

No, it was unpleasant because Louis locked himself in a dressing room and had to sit there for a long time, waiting to feel normal again, after Gemma had rattled on about clothes and some grand tradition of wolf socialist economies and Louis gradually realized that what she meant was she was going to buy Louis more things than anyone had ever bought for him in his life. 

The dressing room was a cramped physical space with a single lightbulb. That was more familiar.

Gemma let him sit. She didn't yell, just talked through the door, and then when he couldn't talk back she didn't break the door down. And, importantly, she didn’t call Harry or anybody else. She just got a fresh thing of tea in a cardboard to-go cup from the store cafe and held it under the gap between the door and the floor. Then she sat with her back to the wall outside and played a game on her phone. Louis mentally moved her a tick over on the mental spectrum toward people-who-could-be-trusted. If this was what trust was. That was a harder thing to see on tv shows.

“Please don’t tell Harry,” Louis said once he came out, and the ceiling had stopped shivering on top of his head. He meant to say all of them, but Gemma nodded.

“I would never,” she said, very soft and very calm. “But Louis, you know, you can tell any of them anything. If you want to. None of us mind. None of us judge.” 

Louis nodded. He didn’t know what to do with that idea so he just took it from her and put it carefully on a shelf inside his mind, for consideration. She smiled at him over her cardboard cup of tea and raised it in the air, like a little tiny cheer, like some kind of secret pact between them. The wolf thumped its tail inside his chest to the rhythm of a heartbeat. Louis smiled back. 

“Can we look at shoes?” he asked. He’d had the flash of something like an opinion about shoes when they went by the display. He was going to at least act as normal as he could until he couldn’t again.

Gemma looped her arm in his and ruffled his hair. Louis let it happen, although his toes curled up in his borrowed boots.

“We can absolutely look at shoes,” Gemma said.

 

**H.**

 

Harry waited on the porch in a huge jacket, breath puffing out in mist in front of his chin, watching them drive up through the thick aftermath of the Christmas snowstorm. Louis was burdened with shopping bags and Gemma was looking the kind of particular smug that she only got when she felt like she was being a good pack provider.

 _Oh,_ Louis thought, something endearingly polite about his strange telepathy. He tromped through the snow with the bags and didn’t make eye contact, looking at a fixed point on the porch instead. Louis’ mind was throwing up the image of the two of them at the train station, clear as day but a strange reversal from Harry's memory. Harry seemed tall in this image and Harry liked it. _Oh, how does it go now?_ Louis thought.

“Hi,” Harry said. 

“Hi,” Louis said, slightly breathless and looking tiny with bags in each fist. Harry loved it. Louis should be on a Christmas card, on a billboard high over the expressway selling whatever was in the bags. Harry was going to dig his old DSLR from where it was languishing in the back of his closet and take pictures of the way that the snowdrifts bounced icy light into Louis’ clear eyes.

“Hi,” Gemma drawled.

“Great timing, was just about to do lunch,” Harry said, hopping down the steps to take the bags from Louis in an easy swoop.

Louis twitched a little, surprised, and Gemma jabbed Harry with her finger as she went up the stairs. Harry growled at her, just a tiny bit.

Louis was trying not to show it, but he hated it, shoulders rising up to his ears. 

"Stop snapping," Harry said to Gemma, and she flicked snow from her coat collar into his face, but dropped the posturing. Harry turned back to Louis with a sigh. 

"I cannot  _believe_ you left without breakfast," Harry said. 

“Uhh,” Louis said.   

“Help me in the kitchen,” Harry said, heading in through the open door and dumping Louis' bags in the hallway. Louis twitched at it, but then Harry had a hand around Louis’ upper arm and was walking him into the kitchen. Given a chance Louis would clearly clean everything around him. Harry had come out from a deep sleep-in to find that Louis had, on the way out with Gemma hours before, straightened everybody’s boots in the mudroom.

Harry felt a woeful distraction patter through Louis’ nerves. _Be normal,_ Louis sighed. Harry accidentally bit the side of his tongue, silent but hard. 

“I can't cook,” Louis said. 

Harry squeezed his arm and let it go, fishing in his pocket for his phone and handing it over. Louis held it carefully. _They're heavier than they looked,_ he thought.

“You don't have to cook. You're gonna DJ,” Harry said. He smiled at Louis over sandwich supplies and hoped he was conveying somehow that he knew that Louis didn't want to talk, couldn't talk about last night or this morning or wolf stuff or…just music. Music was good.

Harry's phone held vast tracts of songs. It took a few minutes for Louis to figure out how the interface worked, all swipes and invisible controls. He hit something with the edge of his thumb that made a loud beat ring out in the kitchen and he yelped, embarrassingly loud, but it made Harry laugh so hard he had to put his head down on the kitchen island. _Lovely,_ Louis’ thoughts flickered, the image of Harry with his messy morning hair spilling out and his eyes crinkled shut.  

Harry caught his breath, choking on the laugh. _Be good,_ he admonished to himself. Good, by the moon, it was hours into this day and he had barely even touched Louis. He was way past the threshold of good. Canonization proceedings were undoubtedly underway.

Louis experimented with turning the volume up and it just made Harry dance more, shuffling with bread loaves in both hands. Niall came in and started singing, really loudly.

“Did you get three bags of shoes?” Niall asked when the song finished, sliding into Louis’ space to give him a light, brief hug around the waist that lasted long enough to send prickles up Harry’s back. Ugh, so possessiveness was going to be a theme for Harry’s wolf, then. Harry sucked on the inside of his mouth and sent sympathetic pains to the wolfish nerve endings, flaring in aborted movements. _Pack, mine,_ the wolf was saying. Well, duh.

Louis patted Niall’s arm, carefully.

“Not _three bags,”_ Louis said, rolling his eyes.

“I definitely saw three,” Niall laughed, putting his nose lightly to Louis’ shoulder. He sniffed, subtly, like he was reassuring himself on Louis’ status. _Definitely a wolf thing,_ Louis’ thoughts flickered, feeling vaguely better as he let Niall do it. Harry was slicing tomatoes across the island, and smiling over at them despite the fact that tomatoes could not fully appreciate the charm of Harry’s smile and Louis was distracted by pretending he wasn’t freaking out under Niall’s gentle touch.

“Two bags,” Louis said. “Gemma said it was fine.”

“Of course it’s fine. Gotta have multiple colors, Niall,” Harry said, reprovingly.

“I love it,” Niall said quickly, rocking back and forth to the new song and making Louis sway with him, fingertips on his shoulders. Louis obliged.

 _Actually three bags, but one of them is small, shouldn’t count,_ Louis thought with a trace of smugness.

The sandwiches were great. Harry spent an inordinate amount of time doing things that Louis had clearly never even imagined doing to sandwiches, like brushing a fine layer of oil on the inside of the bread slices and then toasting them under a broiler. Niall took three of them and a bag of tortilla chips into the lounge, but by then Louis had curled himself onto the kitchen window seat and Harry wasn't about to move him. He seemed drained and newly hesitant, like something had happened this morning out with Gemma.

Harry pulled out bags of flour and scrutinized the shelves for interesting flavors. When in doubt, bake. 

Louis kept one fingertip on the screen of Harry’s phone so that it wouldn’t go to sleep and lock itself, because he liked Harry’s music. He was making careful note of the titles, like it was all new, even the songs that must have played a thousand times on the radio, the ones that Harry thought everybody knew. Harry didn’t want to draw attention to it, but he also kind of wanted to reach over and give Louis the password, hell, imprint Louis’ finger on the unlock sensor of the phone, _just take it, anything mine is yours, really._  

“I don’t mind,” Harry said, surprising Louis, who had been in the middle of starting to wonder anxiously whether anyone had noticed his bags in the hall and if he should wash some dishes or do something to help Harry, although he didn’t like the thought, still intimidated by the big kitchen and the endless food he’d never seen before coming out of the fridge.

Harry flushed. Too much snooping, too transparent.

“I mean I don’t mind, you sitting there, you’re managing the music, I like it when people are around when I cook,” he said.

“Ok,” Louis said. 

"Guess somebody should supervise your taking apart the kitchen," Louis said, looking at the phone again, but a twitch in his nose.  _He'd tell me._ Louis’s mind was a shifting net holding slippery thoughts, but Harry could feel the way he sank back into that feeling and let the rising tension drain from his shoulders.

Harry put his face down into a bag of walnuts and felt a peculiar mix of guilt and triumph.

He had to tell Louis about this, the telepathy, the wolfish whispers leaking out from the join of Louis' skull like the pools of water melting down snowboots. They had to figure that out. The doctor was coming, there were other packs to meet, there was _so much_ that Louis needed. But he didn't need to feel even more broken than Harry could already see he did. It ran jagged through Louis’ thoughts, like a glass knife shedding splinters.  _Different._

But now it was lunchtime. One day at a time, one sandwich at a time, one song at a time. That was how it was going to work.

_Be normal._

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

_Before the inn there had been the apartment, and before the apartment there had been the home._

They called those places homes. And Louis knew that other people had it worse, it wasn't like he didn't know that. It was a thought that had echoed, coming like a reliable tail of the spirals of loneliness every time they had hit him. Other people had it worse and he was supposed to be so, so much more grateful than he was, he was sure.

Certainly that was what the grownups who ran those places always said, that gratitude would help you. Different faces with the same words no matter what youth home you were put in. But _home?_ They tended to all mock that together, no matter what lines of animosity and allyship were inevitably drawn between the residents. Everybody agreed that felt like an insult of a name for a place that was more safety than comfort. But still, safety wasn’t to be taken for granted.

Louis was a lot of things, but the main thing was that _Louis was a monster._

He’d felt the wolf and he’d shoved the boy down in the hallway with it, with the inhuman strength and the snapping nerves underneath it. Louis knew a thousand things like _he’s angry because he’s lost_ and _one inexpert fist isn’t going to do that much damage_ and _they throw you out for fighting_ and _I don’t want to hurt anyone_ , but the wolf knew only a few things like _you don’t belong_ and _if you don’t fight you might lose._

He’d known that he was going to change when the boy came for him. He'd known, and yet he hadn’t been able to make himself leave, and for that….Louis didn’t know if there was any forgiveness for that.

 

**L.**

 

Here were remarkable things: two nights of good sleep settled the wolf enough to feel like a low prowl of softened hearing and big yawns, like Louis’ chest had turned into a cave of moss instead of a barred prison. Three nights of sleep made Louis feel like he’d recovered an entire quarter of his brain, previously lost. A good day turned into a good week.

A _week_ of good, safe, settled sleep was like being born into a new and better body and possibly into another planet. One with less gravity and more green.  

Too much green, potentially. Liam showed up at every breakfast with two cups of pressed-wheatgrass smoothies, one for him, one for Louis. Louis learned that Liam had an entire wheatgrass  _situation_ in his room, little shelves made out of closet racks from Home Depot. Zayn gagged audibly into his toast, but Louis drank them because honestly. He felt better for it.

Not to mention having his own bathroom with its own shower, his _own collection of toiletries_ that seemed bigger every time he went in. Louis frowned narrow-eyed at both Harry and Gemma for that, but it felt impossible to figure out when _everyone_ was doing so many things, half-behind his back and not even ashamed of themselves. Niall stuck a guitar by his bed and looked blank when he was asked about it. Liam came back from the Eastern pack smelling like strange wolves and making Zayn roll his eyes, but carrying an armful of novels that found their way to Louis’ bookshelves. And Zayn was there somehow when the wolf felt snappish, pushing the others out of the room and clearing space. Zayn seemed tuned into Louis’ wolf in a way that was disconcertingly observant.

And Harry was _everywhere._ Louis couldn’t lie to himself about the way that every part of him, wolf and boy, oriented toward Harry whenever Harry was in the room. And maybe it was mutual--maybe the world was upside down and turned to fantasy, but Louis wasn’t ever going to be blind to the quick thoughtfulness and hovering nearness of an attractive boy.

And what an attractive boy. Louis tried not to stare. Louis mostly failed.

Harry was there at his elbow with warm things or food or quick answers when another member of the pack asked Louis something he didn’t want to answer. The only thing that Harry hadn’t done, really, was kiss Louis again.

To be fair, Louis had done it the first time, and there had been the extenuating circumstances of his nearly running away. Louis had no idea what to do about it now that he was choosing to stay. For at least a little while- _for now,_ he told the wolf, and the wolf twisted something up in the pit of his stomach, and he ignored that too. 

 _I love the wolf just as much as you do,_ Zayn had said. Well, he couldn’t be right about _everything_.

 

**H.**

Harry wanted to kiss Louis at every single opportune moment and most of the inopportune moments, too. But the only thing that Harry wanted more than he wanted makeouts (and he wanted those a _lot_ ) was for Louis to feel safe.

Louis deserved…life, right now, the kind of life he'd been supposed to have, pack life. He deserved to feel rooted in the pack and unthreatened. He deserved the predictable intimacy that they'd all gotten to grow up with, shared resources and crowded evenings and never-doubted companionship. It was part of what it meant to be a wolf, and Louis didn't even know to _want_ it.

It was such a tangle to convince someone to stay with the pack and also that they should be your boyfriend. Harry thought there might be a proper sequence for it, but whatever the sequence was it wasn't at typical Harry speed, if the warning glances and occasional jabs he got from Niall and the rest of them were anything to judge by.

So he didn’t kiss Louis, not in the mornings when he was sleepy and even quieter than usual and drooping over coffee, not in the afternoons when he was fresh and jumping with Zayn in the basement, not in the evenings when they pulled the big tv out of the closet in the lounge and watched movies, Louis tucked into the corner of the couch, watching the rest of them as much as he ever watched the screen.

A good day turned into a good week, the lull of the inn’s holiday break surrounding them in peace. Louis came out of the room next to Harry’s rumpled and adorable for enough mornings in a row to get less worried, waiting in line for coffee and starting to reach for the puppy-patterned mug Harry had assigned him without waiting for somebody to give it to him. He played games with Zayn in the basement and came back up with skateboard bruises and a glowing grin that Harry replayed in his head for the next hour. He beat every last one of them in Scrabble, which made Liam retreat to the corner of the lounge and mope until Harry coaxed him out with another snowball fight.

Louis remained quiet, but his mind unbent as the days went on, and it made Harry's heart sing. After a week Louis still startled easily, still looked around the inn like he was testing everything. But it was better and better and better. He started to get as funny outside of his head as he was inside, started wearing Niall's clothes and stealing Liam's protein shakes in the morning, a glint in his eye. Harry taught him to chop wood and managed to not have a heart attack when Louis casually flung the axe down near his feet.

It was, unfortunately, torture knowing that their kiss crossed Louis’ mind, too, when he looked at Harry’s face. He had to tell him. He had to tell him without scaring him. But the telepathy was multifaceted, shot through with a thousand desires, sometimes there and sometimes not, unpredictable and inexplicable. After the break, Harry promised himself. Right now he was paralyzed, locked too far into the undergrowth of Louis’ slow, complicated trust.

Well, he couldn't be honest about _everything._

**L.**

Living in an inn involved a lot of people coming and going. Louis thought this would be terrifying but it turned out to be perfect. None of the guests stayed for long enough to feel bothersome, and it introduced a kind of activity for the others that Louis felt like a weight off his shoulders. He’d always had a sneaking suspicion that he could be a _people person_ (err, _a people wolf,_ he snickered to himself in the lounge corner as Gemma gave them all a rundown on the week, and Harry looked at him from all the way across the room, wide-eyed and mostly dimple, and Louis had to wipe a hand across his face and stare into his fist). If navigating _people_ hadn’t always been fraught with the threat of, well, of being a threat.

(“You won’t hurt anybody here, not with the woods all around you, whether you can change or not,” Zayn had said. He’d volunteered it out of nowhere on the way to bed a few days into Louis’ stay, and Louis had dropped the tube of toothpaste he’d just gotten out of the hall supply closet.

“You can’t know that,” Louis said. Barely said, in a whisper. Zayn wasn’t looking at him, was looking easily down the hall like he was contemplating the carpet. 

“I do know that,” Zayn said. “I know it because Liam gave me enough lectures when I came here about how instincts aren’t dangerous, they just need to be managed. I know it because I remember when you live in only one kind of instinct for a few months you start to think that’s all the wolf is, but it’s not. Even I thought that, and I’d grown up in a pack.”

Louis had opened his mouth, felt the flash memories of whoever those other wolves had been press up against the insides of his teeth, like a too-large fish that couldn’t surface.

“You don’t have to believe me,” Zayn said. “But I’m gonna keep telling you.”

Then he’d slouched down the hall to his room without looking back. Wearing a stolen pair of Liam’s pajamas, Louis realized, in a long-con game called _annoy Liam as soon as he starts looking directly at Zayn again,_ which he hadn’t done since coming back from the eastern pack two days before.)

The first guests arrived for the New Year’s and caused Gemma to come into Louis’ room again with even more tea, and have a long and thoughtful conversation about how Louis absolutely didn’t need to feel like he had to be involved in the operations. Louis, who was getting better at this seemingly unavoidable Gemma Time, interrupted what was clearly going to be a whole wind-up speech to say that he’d actually quite like something to do.

(“Niall can show you how turn down and laundry works,” Gemma had said.

Louis politely informed her that he’d done office cleaning at night all over the city for two and a half years, so he was already pretty excellent at cleaning, certainly better than any of the boys, from what he could tell. He didn’t fully understand why that made Gemma’s face twist so quickly that she had to turn and look out the window. After all, that job had been one of the best out of the many, a kindness from a woman in the immigrant family that had lived next to the first youth home. _When you have to work at night, work somewhere safe,_ she’d told Louis, and taken him on one of her shifts, and gotten him on the cleaning rotation for cash that didn’t require age checks or papers. They’d both known that _safe_ in their part of the city meant _wherever people aren’t_ , and Louis had seen the photos on her wall of the boys his age who never seemed to come home. When he’d scrapped enough together to move out of the youth home, he’d let her hug him, long and fierce. He’d been even quieter then, _thank you_ sticking in his throat, afraid of being too much, too presumptive. He’d never managed to say it.

“I like it,” Louis told Gemma, “Really. Cleaning’s the easiest thing to do. You know what you need to do and then you just do it.”

“Ok,” Gemma said, briskly. And it was a good effort, but she was still a Styles with all those emotions right on the surface, so Louis patted her arm with a little wolfish nudge as he went out to find Niall and the washers. Gemma leaned into it.)

The people who came to the inn were kind and human and utterly oblivious, in the general way of humans. They stayed in the front half of the huge house and they spent a few days marveling at the wilderness preserve, or shopping in the little village. Louis got up early and went to bed early, so he avoided most of them, but started watching them out the windows and then encountering them around the paths up to the woods. They were nonthreatening, uninquisitive about him, and generally too distracted by their own vacations to do more than say _hi_ and sometimes, _this way to town?_  

Louis knew the way into town, now, and even had a cafe to recommend, if they asked, based on its five-shelf-deep tea library. Gemma had dropped him off there while she went on a few more shopping trips, and Louis rotated between black and white teas instead of panicking about all the clothes. He had his own mug in the inn’s kitchen, and it had a parade of dogs emblazoned in colors on it, dalmations and saint bernard’s and chihuahuas and french bulldogs. It was ridiculous. It was good. Harry smiled every time he picked it up, and Harry’s smile was freaking beautiful. 

(“You’ll learn to identify the different species of human guest,” Harry said one night, tapping a spoon into the bowl and peacefully watching the dough slough off the edge. Harry made dough _so slowly_ despite the fact that he must have made thousands, hundreds of thousands of cookies at this point. Louis had started pulling out the butter to soften it on his after-dinner kitchen round of counter cleaning.

“That’s true,” Liam said, whittling a broken table leg at the corner table. Liam was too much. _Whittling._ The table leg was gradually transforming into an open spiral around a tiny figure of a deer. It was gorgeous, the chary movements of Liam’s strong hands a testament to his personality. “I should give a nature course on the species of woods tourists.”  

“Kinda solipsistic,” Louis said, just to make Harry’s face widen into his gorgeous grin. Harry loved reading words, or at least he loved _Louis’_ reading words, and it gave Louis a particularly prickly feeling in his throat to drop one into a sentence and look for Harry’s reaction. He wasn’t sure but it felt like Harry knew he was doing it on purpose. 

“There are hiking couples, they get up early and leave. There’s the thirty-something friends who mostly want to drink late into the night in the lounge and complain about their careers,” Liam said, ticking them off his hands.

“Who are your favorites?” Louis asked.

“Whoever interrupts me the least when I’m trying to find birds on the trails,” Liam said.

“They’re all my favorites,” Harry said, “Everybody except the hopelessly heterosexual bros with the terrible cologne. I like the women who come through for the big trail in the summers, along with their backpacks and books. Like you, you know.”)

Liam led an extremely popular nature hike which guaranteed at least four mammals and ten different bird species. Louis privately thought that Liam was using his nose to find the animals, and that this was cheating, but he respected it. Niall and Harry traded cooking with some of the older pack members. Louis was not sure at all what Zayn did. Possible he was mostly decoration.

And there were others, keeping their distance. Louis had seen some grown wolves named Kian and Eric around quite a bit, and had the sense that they were important to Gemma’s job. And then there was a twenty-something woman named Kendra who’d obviously grown up as close as sisters with Gemma. She gave Louis way too long of a hug, but he dealt with it. Louis was pretty sure that Gemma and Harry had limited the number of wolves he had to deal with, because it was mostly quick _hellos_ and then vanishing. Most of the pack had wide ranges, Harry said, _but they’re all back for the moon._

The full moon. The next full moon was a few weeks away, was the one time that Louis was definitely going to actually be a wolf again. _Snow Moon,_ Harry had said, over the head of a snowman that he had put one of Zayn’s hats on (Louis’ contribution had been several sticks for arms, turning it into a snow-tipede, which distressed Zayn even more than the hat theft. Harry took more photos than seemed warranted, which turned into a session of teaching Louis about smartphone cameras and filters. Now he had Harry in twenty-seven colors in his pocket, and nobody had to know. Every day, so much new magic). The inn was going to be closed for the entire week of the full moon.

Louis was, with great intensity, not thinking about the moon. He’d gone a very long time not thinking about the future, so it came rather naturally.

 

**H.**

 

“It’s gonna be great,” Harry said, bracingly. Harry found himself saying this a lot lately. Too much, undoubtedly, so he cleared his throat and tried another option.

“It’s gonna be very nice,” he said. There, more measured. Harry was chill. Harry was the epitome of chill. Harry fell backwards in a snowbank, which was the second time this morning, and very unfair. He sighed at the row of icicles hanging off the porch.

“You’ve only survived about a thousand winters here, you’d think at some point you’d learn how to walk in snow,” Liam said.

“Easier with paws,” Harry grumbled.

“ _Everything_ is easier as a wolf, isn’t it,” Niall said. “Except for remembering to distinguish between rabbits and like, snacktime.”

“Oh shut up,” Harry said, “Literally _one time_ , and I was only _looking at it,_ ”

“Did you make sure to grab a granola bar before we shift, Hazza? Just checking,” Niall said, before Harry half-lunged out of the snowdrift and startled him right off the porch steps. Niall fell backwards, laughing, into the square of ground that was going to turn into a garden in a few months. 

“Watch it,” Zayn snapped, because it was mostly his garden. Zayn’s unabashed love for gardening had been a fabulous surprise, but it gifted the inn with cheerful daffodil bouquets for all of April and May. Harry crouched down to pat the snow covered dirt tenderly. He’d helped Zayn plant the bulbs that previous fall.

“They’re stronger than they look, don’t worry,” Harry said.

 _What is he talking about?_ Louis wondered.

“Pretty things,” Harry said.

“Why are you so weird,” Zayn drawled, at Harry, the universe, and everything. Louis’ face quirked into an almost-laugh. Harry considered the wisdom of falling into devastating longing with the one person who seemed to get along with their most antisocial wolf. He huffed a defiant mist-filled breath out to no one.  

“Looking forward to a good run, good to stretch out,” Liam said, already doing calf stretches. “Figure we should run the borders, do a full loop.” 

“What on earth is the point of stretching before you grow different muscles?” Niall asked him. Liam just frowned. 

 _Is it really easier?_ Louis wondered. He was quiet this morning, but his mind was louder. Harry closed his eyes and dug his bare feet into the snow, felt the wet, felt the intoxicating nearness of Louis’ thoughts. They were right up against the mental barrier today, and it was driving Harry _crazy._ As was the shape of Louis in the sweatpants he’d borrowed from Zayn that morning, doing a much better job than they’d ever done on Zayn’s skinny ass, in Harry’s extremely unbiased opinion.

Louis had his head ducked down, focusing on his snowboots and working the thick laces through the stiff grommets. They were Liam’s old boots, because the wolves had figured out that Louis was more likely to wear things that were hand-me-downs, and there was a sprinkling of rust around the hardware that set Harry’s teeth on edge. But it was fine. It was _great._ It was very nice. Harry hopped from one foot to the other, sinking deeper into the snow with every fidget.

“It’s gonna be great,” Harry heard himself say again. Gemma was right, he was turning into their mom.

“It’s just a walk, don’t think we need a pep talk,” Niall said. Like Harry and unlike Louis, Niall was only in a loose t-shirt and sweatpants.

“Excuse me for being cheery,” Harry said. Zayn rolled his eyes, and Harry snapped teeth at him. They wanted to grow longer immediately, gums aching.

Louis had stopped lacing and started watching. _This is a bad idea,_ he thought, mind humming with a sudden spike of anxiety, _wolf_ anxiety. Zayn stepped back, ducking his head in subtle reassuring body language. No play-fights with unstable pack bonds, they all _knew_ that.

“Don’t forget the skates, don’t forget we’ve got to show you the pond, and the lookout,” Harry rushed to say, throwing his arm out at the bag behind Louis. Distraction was key.

“Yeah, yeah,” Louis said, grabbing at it. They knew, of course, that Louis couldn’t change, but they also knew that Louis’ wolf needed the woods, even if Louis himself doubted this. Couldn’t stay trapped in the inn forever, even if Harry also wished they could send all the boys out to wolf around and he could just stay on the couch with Louis, coax him close, maybe pop on a scary movie and pull his most patented winter date moves. They’d barely had a second alone. _Pack, then boyfriend,_ Harry told himself firmly. There was a _plan._

 _So antsy,_ Louis was thinking, but it was a fond thought, and Harry could see _himself_ in his head in the way that Louis’ telepathy felt about Harry, shining and magnetic and...a little scared, maybe. _That makes two of us,_ Harry thought, where no one could hear him.

“Harry’s so bad at snow, you better protect him while Liam makes us run laps,” Niall said to Louis, which was gross defamation. That got an actual laugh out of Louis albeit into his laces, precious and high-pitched and soft. 

“I just came out to have a good werewolf time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now,” Harry said. 

“For moon’s sake,” Zayn said, pushing past all of them and starting up the field in a loose jog. Niall whooped and ran after him, and after a moment’s hesitation, Liam started running too.

Harry felt the wind push his hair off his shoulders, felt the pull and contraction of his muscles under the skin. It had been too long since they’d had a good change, caught up in getting Louis settled, unsure what to do with a wolf who couldn’t change. But today the sun was sending sparkles shooting over the wind-ridged drifts of snow. It was clear and bright and the woods were calling.

“Cultish,” Louis said, possibly to cover up his nerves. _Maybe I can just stay and they won’t notice. Maybe I can just be the least wolf wolf to ever wolf._ Louis was feeling the pull of the forest too, Harry knew, because Harry could feel it through his mind with every brush of wind. His hands were shaking.

“Come on,” Harry said, already moving away from the inn and into the field. _The things I let him make me do,_ Louis thought, ruefully. Harry laughed, wind whirling into his hot mouth, blood heating through every limb. “Come on, come on, come on!”

**L.**

 

Louis learned pretty quickly that the woods weren’t quiet. 

You imagine them quiet. But people who don’t live there only have a cartoon idea of woods. Pine trees drawn like a Christmas cartoon, big triangles of green with no differentiation, thick sticks of brown in a waxy crayon, and done.

Had he ever drawn the woods in crayon? Was this a memory, or just nervous imagination? He could almost feel it, sheets of paper, magnets on a fridge. Had he signed his name in crayon, and was that name _Louis?_ It made Louis jumpy to think about it, some tiny child in his past that was supposed to be _him_ , drifting under the surface.

The woods were, in fact, lousy with life. There were birds and bugs and furry things, and the slow growth of large plants, the quick water-air-life suck of small ones. There was a world, and in that world--wolves. There were layers to the forest, undergrowth and midgrowth, leaves and needles competing for sunlight, a thousand different ways to be alive. 

And Louis had barely known how to do it when the world had been only a single room and three different changes of clothes.

Harry brushed up next to Louis in the field, shoving through a snowbank and past Zayn to do it, and he grabbed his hand. Louis hissed in a breath, and Harry squeezed. 

“Hey,” Harry said, “Don’t be hard on yourself.”

“Categorically impossible,” Louis said. Harry was warm, hot almost, radiating heat out even just from the loose hold of his fingers. The others were ahead of them and not looking back. Louis wasn’t cold but he was on the edge of it, felt the human and the wolf disagree vehemently about where they were going. _Safe,_ he told the wolf.

Harry squeezed his hand again. So maybe safe was a matter of perspective.

 

***

 

“Most of the pack’s already pretty far out, to the eastern side of the range,” Niall said at Louis’ shoulder.

Louis knew, but he nodded anyway. Niall had kept up a patter of easy conversation and he’d been doing it since Zayn and Liam had melted off into the brush. Louis had the sensation that they were giving him space, maybe, balancing carefully between too many and too few wolves around him. Harry was on his other side, quiet and a few feet away.

“Are you ready?” Harry asked. Louis looked at him. It was ridiculous, how much Louis liked looking at him. Muffled light from the treetops bounced through needles and the clear winter air to dance around Harry. He looked tall and lean and a little seductively crazy, a barefoot boy taking his shirt off in the middle of all the ice. Not a goosebump in his skin.

“He was born ready. Literally!” Niall said. He bumped his chin into Louis’ shoulder, and meandered toward the trees. Louis rolled his eyes. 

“Should I get a stick, or a ball or something?” Louis said.

“Oi,” Niall yelped, and the yelp morphed at the end into something higher-pitched. He crouched and Harry crouched and Louis could see it--no, could he _feel_ it? Like a wave washing over your head when you were already wet, not shocking, just a re-immersion.

They were suddenly dangerous, sinew and tendon, long muzzles and strong limbs, stepping easily out of the clothes that had fallen carelessly into the snow. _I’d fuck that up,_ Louis thought, visions of a wolf tangled hopelessly in pajamas. He snorted a little, and the wolves looked sharply at him, and the snort died in his throat. It was disconcerting, the wide staring faces of predators, even when you knew who they were.

“Hi,” Louis whispered. Sounded stupid, out loud. The wolves just kept looking. The light in here was darker, tones of blues and greys and greens that his human eyes had to strain for. “Sorry, don’t know how to talk this way.”

Niall’s wolf wasn’t as long-limbed as Harry’s, had a familiarly comforting tilt to his jaw. Harry was as beautiful as Louis remembered, stock-still and looking back at him. The wolf almost looked a little puzzled, like he was listening for something and not catching it.

Niall was already restless, jumping over sticks to reach the edge of the deeper treeline, a whine in the back of his throat signaling that it was time to go searching for the pack. The woods were full of life, and the wolves needed to get into it.

“Ok,” Louis said, feeling shaky and clumsy in his own limbs, moving with the boots weighting down his feet. Harry was an intimidating shadow just a few feet away, soundless where Louis was snapping twigs and brushing through frosted leaves. _Can we change like this?_ Louis asked the wolf inside, just a flicker of a thought, before he quenched it in a wave of fear. A wolf in control and a wolf out of control were two very different things.

The animals ran, vanishing like smoke in the trees.

 

***

 

“You’re overwhelmed,” Harry said, dropping down on the grass at Louis’ side. No shirt, but thankfully for Louis’ sanity, in baggy sweatpants, brown with a yellow stripe up the side, and three inches too short, coming up his ankle and showing his big, bare feet. Of course Harry wasn't cold. Harry could temperature regulate like a wolf, could transform without losing his mind, could _read_ minds, could do everything.

Louis frowned at him. “What? No, it's fine, not overwhelmed,” he said.

Louis was learning to recognize the fresh-sweat sheen of just-turned, smooth hunching shoulder muscles, newly-human. It sparked something animal in Louis’ gut that needed to be ignored. That, basically, was what Louis could do. That and transform under the full moon into something that still terrified him. The full moon was two weeks away, and two weeks hadn't even been enough time to start getting his own snacks from the kitchen without asking.

Louis sighed. He’d found his way to a high knoll with a treeless overlook, close to the spot where he thought he and Harry had ended up on the previous full moon.

“It wasn’t a question, but this is,” Harry said, arching an eyebrow down at him and waggling a bare foot around in a circle at the ground. “Would it be better or worse if I sat here with you?”

Louis tilted his head to the side, pursed his lips in a quizzical way. _Obviously better,_ he thought, _always._ Harry’s grin got a little bigger, lips slipping up to show his teeth like he couldn’t even contain it. Louis had to look away when Harry smiled at him like that, too big and almost like Harry was about to burst out with something, some declaration, some feeling.  

“You can sit, your woods, isn’t it,” Louis said, looking back away over the small view of this small hill. Mostly trees and shrubbery, and whatever his wolfish nose told him was past that. He wrapped his arms back around his knees and put his chin on the top of the right one, where it had already been steadily working an indent into the skin.  

“Your woods, too. Don’t think I don’t hear it when you keep doing that,” Harry said. “So. Tell me what felt overwhelming?” 

Harry settled down, a glowing heat source. Louis wanted to tip over onto his side and nestle into Harry’s. Nonsense.

“Dunno, can't really keep up on two legs, can I,” Louis said. It had been a lot more than that but Harry nodded.

Harry had a thermos in one of his hands and Louis had no idea where that came from. Not, he hoped, from one of the metal bins in the woods. Maybe Niall said wolves didn't get sick but Louis wasn't about to chance drinking from a months-old thermos with a tinge of rust on the bottom and a hipstery stick drawing of trees on the front. 

“You will,” Harry said. He tossed his thermos to his other hand and pressed it up against Louis’ arm. Even through the fabric of his coat, he could feel the warmth seeping into his skin. What even was it?

“Liam heats up cider and puts it in the cache when we’re gonna run a whole territory loop,” Harry said. 

“Liam is the nicest,” Louis said. Harry pulled an offended face, but it wasn’t real, and Louis nearly stuck his tongue out at Harry but stifled it back into his knees.

“Hey,” Louis ventured, “The whole pack is pretty nice. You were right.” 

“I know,” Harry said. “Let’s keep talking about you, though.”

“Um,” Louis said, “No? There’s nothing to talk about?” 

He was still cold, still such a shitty wolf, unable to even keep himself warm in the woods. He pulled his arms tighter around his legs.

“Uh huh,” Harry said. He dropped the thermos into the ground in front of them and looped his arm around Louis’ shoulders. “For instance, let’s talk about you and the pack and touching. You’ve already noticed wolves are really touchy. Do you like it?”

“What?” Louis asked. Harry’s body was _right there_ like it was _nothing._ He nudged Louis with his shoulder, fingers tapping on the other side of his torso, present and solid but with enough careful space that Louis knew he wasn’t putting the full weight of his arm out.  

“It’s something you want, yeah? I can feel you freak out every time I do something like this, but it also seems like you like it. The physical stuff goes along with the pack stuff, helps communication. The wolves aren’t always as subtle as we are, you know? They like to talk in touch. Your wolf probably wants to know how it’s allowed to feel, yeah? So if you tell me what you like, I can help the wolf feel better.”

It was irrelevant, wasn’t it, to know? Louis tried, mainly, to like what he could get, more than get what he could like. Harry made a sad-sounding noise.

“I have no idea how to have this conversation,” Louis said.

“Here, let's start with me,” Harry said, pulling his arm away and re-situating himself so he could face Louis, crosslegged in the snow and looking endearingly sincere. Nobody that hot should get to look that sincere, Louis thought, it was deadly.

Harry extended a careless arm. He wasn't cold, even with the early morning wind whipping around them, across all his bare skin. He might have been on his bed at home as much as on a high overlook in a wild forest.

“You try different kinds of touch, and I'll say if I like it,” Harry said. Louis gave him a look, half-dour and half-questioning. He'd better not be being patronized. He's touched people. Effectively, he thinks.

“It's not like that,” Harry continued, in a Harry tumble of words that almost make Louis dizzy, but a nice kind of dizzy. “I mean not like...I'm serious. I know you've had all kinds of experiences but I mean, contact with wolves, in territory, come on, I can feel your head spinning. Just platonic, affectionate contact. Even humans need it, and wolves really need it. How are you supposed to know what you like if you don't experiment? I'll show you. If you want? I mean. Maybe I’m making it worse.”

“You’re not,” Louis hastened to say. _Do you ever?_ Harry looked relieved. Louis made a fist and punched his arm, a sharp, swift tap.

“That’s fine,” Harry said brightly. “Zayn hates that kind of stuff, Niall loves it. There’s a lot of roughhousing between Niall and Liam. Personally, I am more of a cuddler.”

Louis raised on eyebrow at that. He felt dumb, _it_ felt dumb, but he pushed the side of his hand up against Harry’s arm and brushed it upwards in a stroke. Ok, it didn’t feel dumb at all.

“See,” Harry said, “I like that. You can do that anytime, Louis. Now you.”

Louis stayed stockstill while Harry reached both hands out and took him by the shoulders, a gentle, heavy squeeze. The wolf wanted to sink forward, bend at the waist and put his forehead on Harry’s shoulder.

“That’s good, slow,” Louis said, blinking, and possibly sounding like a complete fucking lunatic, _thanks a lot_ to the wolf, which was feeling...smug? Could the wolf feel smug? With teeth-baring. _You’re an asshole,_ Louis thought at it. Harry squeezed again.  

“Figured,” he said softly. “It’s mutual. I’ve got you surrounded, which is a little disconcerting for wolves but it’s also comforting, my wolf asking yours to trust. But you can see both my hands and you’ve got access to my vitals, yeah? Mutual.”

 _Do me a favor,_ Louis said to the wolf. It was prowling around his heart and his heart was pounding, but even that wasn’t enough to feel warm. Harry had a thicket of twigs caught up in his hair, Louis hadn’t even noticed until now. The thermos, rolled off to the side, melted a patch of snow into water against Louis’ thigh.  

“If you like it, you can do it,” Harry said, like he was giving Louis something, permission. “It’ll probably be mutual.”

Louis only needed to inch forward, to bend a little, to suddenly be caged fully in Harry’s arms and putting his face down onto Harry’s shoulder. So he did. The wolf wanted to crawl up his throat, but it was a good terrible, somehow. Harry smelled like pinesap, like boy, the skin of his shoulder under the corners of Louis’ face. 

“Hi,” Harry said, catching in his throat in a murmur. He dropped one hand from Louis’ shoulder to put it on his neck, holding him in.

“Harry,” Louis said with his eyes closed, “I’m not this...good person, that you seem to think I am.”

“No, you are,” Harry said. “You cheated at board games last night, but you’re generally a very good person. But Liam deserved to be taken down a peg, he’s been winning far too many times in a row at game nights.”

“I hurt somebody,” Louis said. Harry...didn’t stop holding him. Moved a little, but only to shift his weight from one side to the other. A week of the best eating of his life probably hadn’t made Louis any less wiry, spiky even, _knobs and bones_ , he’d been helpfully told. He might not be that comfortable to hold. Harry held him tighter, somehow, without constraining him. A wolf superpower like Gemma’s, maybe. The wolf was helpfully observing all of this, in case Harry started to flee, in case this was no longer their territory, in case the pack came back and _changed their minds,_ which the wolf was very upset about, and it wanted, somehow, for Louis to unhinge his jaw and swallow the woods whole so that no one could take this forest from them. Maybe it wanted Louis to do that with Harry.  

Remarkable things, Louis reminded himself. Like people who cared enough to ask what he liked. Maybe he could learn to be just a little bit honest in return.

“I was in a group home, most of the time,” Louis said. “Most of the time I can remember. And most of the time, I wasn’t a wolf. I only changed at the full moon. When I was a kid I went...there was a big park with some clusters of trees and I was just, stupid, lucky, I don’t know. I think my wolf knew to get as far away from anyone as possible. I managed to keep it all a secret.” 

“Yeah?” Harry prompted. His face was pressed up against the top of Louis’ head. His breath was close enough to smell, for a nose that was as good as Louis’, and it was like the laundry that Louis slept in and like the kitchen and like the borrowed boots and like the side of Louis’ borrowed bedroom that was next to Harry’s.

“I don’t know if I was able to change like you all, but, I think I used to be able to,” Louis said. Harry’s hand flickered on his neck before it stilled again.

“There was a guy in the home, a few years older than me, always giving me crap. Most people just don’t like me, you know?”

“No,” Harry said. Harry, sweetest wolf on earth. Louis smiled a little, reflexively.

“Well,” he said. “Anyway. It doesn’t even matter how, right? He came at me from behind and I...I don’t know. I was halfway to a wolf and halfway to a human and he ended up with a bite mark the size of a dinner plate and I can’t even remember it, Harry. And the guy who ran the home saw and--” 

“Sell you to the circus,” Harry whispered. 

“Right,” Louis said, and then he blinked his eyes open. _Wait, how did you--_

“--is what you said the first night, on Christmas,” Harry said.

“I don’t think he fully believed what he saw. He just thought I was, you know. A freak.”

 _A monster--_ Harry made an angry noise, which was coming a little late in the game, Louis thought. Louis was angry, still, for the boy in the hallway who’d called him those names, who'd startled him, for the system that had put them there, most of all for his own instincts, being so wrong. Being so treacherous.

“He was ok,” Harry said, sounding as certain as if he could see it.

“Yeah, he ended up being fine. I still had to leave,” Louis said. He realized that Harry was nudging the side of his head with his cheek, very wolfish, a low little huffing noise in his throat. “Anyway,” he said, a bit confused about how he’d let all of that out, and they were still here-- “So? Anyway. Now you? Know that?”

“Now I know you’re a good person,” Harry said.

 _That_ made Louis pull up, finally. He gave Harry the most skeptical look he could muster. “Your wolf is not _wrong,”_ Harry said, “What do you want me to say? That I don’t understand that you were scared? That you used to be able to change and you’re so afraid of accidentally hurting someone again, that you won’t even let yourself?”  

“I don’t,” Louis started-- “Do you really think that’s why I can't change?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it makes sense. That you haven’t let yourself just, be whoever you want? And that meant not letting the wolf out, right? I want to know what _you_ like, what _you_ need,” Harry said.

Louis bit Harry's ear. It crossed his mind in a flash and then he did it, because his inhibitions were apparently all shot to hell. Suddenly he was just there over Harry's shoulder, his teeth fixed carefully on the edge of Harry's ear and the very edge of his tongue pressed into the soft skin, warm and intimate.  _Too much talking,_ the wolf argued, exhausted from the emotions of memory and wanting so much to be in the _now,_ to shunt Louis away from bad things. It was a wolf thing he didn’t even know how to interpret, distracting and playful and doing something to see what it would get them. It was protective, maybe. Was his wolf protective of  _him?_ And here he'd always thought they'd be enemies. Frenemies?

He expected Harry to shove him off, yell, _I_ _don't like it_ and laugh. It was only rough housing, he was convincing himself, his right arm braced awkwardly straight in the snow and his body stretched out balancing over Harry's lap, not in it. Just a little ear nip, because Harry had so recently been a wolf, the unrealness of the woods making Louis feel drugged.

Louis started to pull away, brain caught up to his own foolishness. Harry's arms whipped up. Harry caught Louis around his vulnerable sides, just over his hips, hands shoving under his shirt, grasping and strong and aggressive. Louis forgot sometimes that Harry carried that easy strength underneath all his silliness but it was undeniable when he used it.

“I like it,” Harry said, low throaty voice going straight through the darkest parts of Louis’ chest. Louis let his ear go, licked his mouth, had no idea what to do with his tongue or what had come over him.

“Sorry,” he said, instead of voicing his thoughts, which were something like _oh god don’t stop._  

Harry tumbled Louis right back into his lap.

“What do you want, then?” Harry asked. He sounded just on the edge of losing it, rough.

“I'm sorry,” Louis said, the words slipping out, sincere and too deep. “I honestly don't know how. I've never had--this, not usually--had someone to talk to like this, about everything.”

“Then maybe it's just time to trust the instincts,” Harry said. Louis had the sudden premonition that Harry was about to say or do more, felt himself slip a little out of balance, felt Harry shift in the snow. But a gust of wind whipped around them and Harry blinked against it, set Louis carefully back down.

"I'm not very breakable, not a _human,_ " Harry said, like it wasn't even a bad thing.   
  
"Right," Louis said, stealing the thermos of cider. It was excellent.   
  
  
***

 _  
Ours,_ the wolf said, when they were done running through the woods and Louis’ legs were aching with a good, drained burn, trailing in the wake of the rest of them, all changed back to human form. _I'll keep the thermos,_ Louis thought at it, flippantly. Louis rolled the still-warm metal of the thermos between his hands. He'd added cider to the list of fantastic winter beverages, maybe he could learn how to make this version of it himself.   
  
_Home,_ the wolf prompted, a very one-trick pony of a monster. God dammit.


	4. Chapter 4

**L.**

Steve was a thin man who gave the impression of tallness, although when he moved it was apparent that this was an illusion, made mostly of limbs and hair.

He radiated warmth though, outsize to the scope of his body. Louis could feel it, tangible like a field of welcome brushing up on the chill outside of his skin, even though Louis had stopped dead in the doorway of the kitchen, startled to find someone else there.

The kitchen was blue-lit with early winter morning light. It was Louis’ favorite time of day, even though everyone else missed it.

Mornings had been a cramped apartment already gone cold, the startling noises of morning supply trains rattling the outside metal on the entire dodgy apartment building. Nobody in his old building had turned the heat on for the morning: some of the families, jammed several-to-a-bedroom in the close apartments around his, had turned it on for a few precious family hours in the evening, bedtime rituals and the squalls of bathtime that Louis could hear through the walls.

Waking up in the inn was different. Waking up warm, safe, and surrounded by the smells and sounds that made his wolf stay settled in his chest? A better kind of morning. While everyone else was still sleeping, Louis liked to get up and around and maybe clean the mudroom in a futile but somehow satisfying effort to keep something clean enough to show appreciation.

“Louis! At long last!” Steve exclaimed. He was smiling, but it was small and calm, quiet for the quiet kitchen. He smelled like fresh wood planks, black coffee, and the tang of something else, maybe faint citrus, or mint. He was standing at the island in a thick hoodie with the words _glory of the good stuff_ emblazoned in italics on top of a neon blue skeleton ribcage.

He didn’t look like any kind of doctor that Louis had ever seen, not that Louis had seen many.

Louis shuffled from one foot to the other, and tried to look less like someone who had been hoping against hope to avoid this meeting, and less vaguely terrified at being the subject of some doctor’s anticipation.

“Doctor Steve?” Louis ventured.

Steve’s entire face crinkled in a grin. “Gemma told me you were so much more polite than all the other rapscallions who live here. Call me Steve.”

“Liam definitely calls you Doctor,” Louis said.

“Wait until he starts trying to convince me to take him out to all the other packs on a medical field rotation program, or some other combination of made-up words,” Steve said, looking immeasurably pleased at the thought.

“I think he’s been trying ‘ _apprenticeship_ ’ lately,” Louis said, and they both smiled, unexpectedly in sync, and reassuring.

“You keep telling a guy he’s got time to get into the field and that he should focus on being an overachieving student for a while...” Steve said, waving a hand.

“After all, if Liam leaves who’s gonna help Niall do the ‘accidental green smoothie cleanse'?” Louis asked with a straight face.

“Accidental green smoothie...?” Steve frowned.

“When you put wheatgrass in the same color mug as Niall’s hot chocolate,” Louis said, “And the rest is green-barf-colored history in the lounge carpet.”

Steve cracked up properly, leaning over the island with the force of his surprised guffaw. Louis watched with satisfaction. He’d been experimenting, bit by bit in hallways with the inn guests or at cash registers to distract himself while Gemma bought more stuff, with the flow of jumping into conversations with strangers without it being manipulative, or hostile, or begging. With the idea that people would simply want to _talk_.

Maybe Steve could be all right people, despite hoodie choices. After all, Louis’ wardrobe was primarily the basic closet package Gemma had forced on him after Christmas sales and the pieces that Niall and Liam kept shuffling into his bedroom in the course of their daily activities of _wandering into Louis’ bedroom while he's playing board games with Harry, like we don’t all have a supernaturally acute wolf noses._

Plus the shameful stash of Harry's waffle shirts, tucked into a careful roll in the very bottom of Louis’ bag. But he wasn't gonna _wear_ those.

Piled-up secrets stashed in a bag he couldn’t even bring himself to touch? Yeah, that seemed about right. Even here, even with the peace of the inn about them, Louis was different. Still tying himself up in the invisible trip-wires of the wolf’s strange needs, his mind’s strange habits. Steve was here to look at all the wrong pieces of his dark, interior machinery, and Louis didn’t feel ready.

Liam had raved about Steve enough at dinner before, but it hadn’t done much to make Louis feel less wary about the whole situation. Steve was a traveling doctor, ran pack to pack across the sectors and lived a life of great adventure and valiant good-doing. At least according to Liam. Louis hadn’t expected Steve to get in so early. He must have come up the road from the town, and Louis wondered for a moment if he’d done it in wolf. He’d probably done it in wolf.

Louis’ arms had come up to twist together at his torso, fingernails biting into his elbows.

Steve was just standing there, letting him think. He didn’t look anything but calm.

This is all right, Louis told the wolf. The wolf sent dubious energy back.

“Can I make you toast?” Steve asked. Louis’ wolf could feel that they were being scanned, up and down and across, even though Steve was subtle about it, sideways eye contact and hands resting gently on the kitchen island.

“Ok,” Louis said.

The wolf prowled, but Steve was already pulling out bread. Harry’s loaf of braided challah, made yesterday in a flurry of flour and complicated water temperature finangling that had stressed Louis out something awful. The revelation that bread was made with something _alive_ that you had to _heat up enough to get angry_ was still distressing Louis somewhere in the back of his mind.

But the fresh bread box wasn’t just open to anyone. Steve must have at least cleared the mysterious bar that meant he had familiar kitchen access. Steve sliced a new thick piece off the loaf. He was wearing rings, like Harry. What happened to them when he shifted?

“Best food in the dang sector at this inn,” Steve commented. “Is Harry drowning you all in Christmas baking still?”

“He made three dozen cookies for movie night,” Louis said, and Steve cackled. Louis felt the left corner of his mouth tilt in a positive direction.

They’ve never been wrong about anyone new, yet, Louis reminded the wolf. Although they were all supposed to be new, Louis reminded himself just as quickly, Harry and Gemma and Niall and Liam and Zayn--but--but he had apparently slid into some other division of the world, the six of them on one side of it. People like Steve on the new side.

“Marmalade or pumpkin butter,” Steve said, now bent into the fridge. He was wearing soft sweatpants and he was in bare feet. Louis grinned for a split second, thinking of the face Harry would make over it.

“Marmalade,” he said.

“Good bet,” Steve said, “I am pretty sure the pumpkin’s from Thanksgiving, last time I was here.”

Bread access and holiday access, then.

The wolf was terrible and fractious and ruled by a thousand split emotions, but the wolf was ears-over-snout deep into the idea of _pack_ so it settled, low in Louis’ chest and interested. _Pack_ , it vibrated in not so much words as an intolerable smugness. _Shut it_ , Louis thought back.

Louis crossed the kitchen and pulled his usual stool out with a foot, sat up on it and rested his elbows on the island. It was glorious to have a usual stool. Sitting was a signal that he was going to cooperate with talking, he knew, and Steve’s face looked happier about it even as he stuffed the too-thick bread into the old toaster on the kitchen counter.

There were two plates out already, Louis noted.

“Gemma told me there was a new wolf,” Steve said. That seemed like a diplomatic way to put it. “I came out from the far eastern side, you know, when she called and said they had a...they found...you found this place.”

“Did she tell you I’m fucked up?” Louis asked, quiet but straightforward.

Might as well do this, if he was going to do this. Gemma had said that Steve was the best at what he did, and Harry had impressed upon Louis the idea that talking to fancy wolf doctors was a thing that would make Harry very happy indeed, and Louis was a terrible sucker in every direction for things that were going to make Harry happy. Louis and his wolf, both.

“Hmm,” Steve said, “Nice sticker. That’s gotta be Harry’s.”

Louis glanced down and saw the phone in his hand. It was getting to be a nervous habit, flicking open the music app, ever since Harry had taught him about it. He had headphones balled up in the pockets of the pajama pants for morning cleaning. The sticker on the worn down case was a pawprint, stuck underneath the fingerprint reader, because Harry was so _dumb_ , so intoxicatingly silly, Louis could just see the buggy-eyed face of joy Harry would make at an awful pun, another wolfish joke.

Harry was asleep in his bedroom upstairs. Louis knew this because Louis liked to pause every morning before he went down to do the pre-everyone-else-is-awake-cleaning, and sit with his back against the door between their bedrooms, and let his wolf sharpen his hearing until he could follow Harry’s small, morning sleep noises.

“Yeah,” Louis said.

“Can I see what you kids are listening to?” Steve asked. “Music gets awfully old in the boondocks. Eastern pack has a terrible thing for stadium folk.”

“Uh, sure,” Louis said, sliding the phone over. _I’m fucked up_ , he thought, hearing his own words in his head. Maybe Steve hadn’t heard.

“Hmm,” Steve said, scrolling. Louis was still awkward with interfaces, found the yielding silky feeling of touchscreens disorienting and strange. The wolves were so rich, in the sense that he’d always understood wealth: they had so much stuff and all of it up-to-date, no half-faded paperwork printed at the library for cents a page, no stealing pens from counters while cashiers weren’t looking.

“I wasn’t going to take it,” Louis said. “The phone, whatever. They just. They wanted me to have it, while I’m here. While I’m...staying for a bit.”

“Did you know that the word pack comes from multiple languages?” Steve asked.

“No,” Louis said, irritation bleeding into his tone.

 _I’m fucked up_ was still hanging there in the kitchen and Steve was just letting it and Louis wanted, with the burning sense of urgency that sometimes rose up from the pit of his stomach and felt like choking--he just wanted to get it over with if this was the moment it was going to happen, the moment someone was finally going to look at him and say, _you’re too wrong and you don’t belong here_. He knew it. The wolf knew it. Why couldn’t anyone else ever say it?

“It does,” Steve said. “German, probably, just referencing a collection of things, maybe a perversion of a Flemish word too. There’s an Italian version, a Latin version. But before it meant wild animals together, it meant a bunch of people.”

“Ok,” Louis said, with great forbearance.

Steve slid the phone back across the island. The toaster dinged, perfectly browned edges which proved that Steve must have worked the inn’s unpredictable appliances before.

“It meant a bunch of _unsavory_ people,” Steve said mildly, “People of low character. A pack of hoodlums. A pack of rapscallions. A pack of very dramatic teenagers who like to snap at each other. Packing heat, packing a punch. It means a great deal many things and no one really knows where the word came from. Maybe we’ll never know.”

Louis felt his bottom lip pushing in between his teeth, felt his throat muscles clench, shifting with something, discomfort, worry, relief? Something, many things.

“But it has never,” and Steve fixed Louis with a stare that went deep, a quality of stare that had something of Steve’s wolf in it, the kind that was always underestimated but rarely beaten, lithe and canny and pushing up against you faster than you realized they were there-- “It has never meant perfect.”

“I’m not--” Louis started, when Steve interrupted--

“Can we talk about who you are, before we talk about who you think you’re not?”

It stopped the words right up against the inside of Louis’ teeth, half-fallen out of his mouth. He stared at Steve, who merely nodded like they’d agreed on something, pulled the toast out and put it on a plate.

Louis took the phone back. He put it in his pocket, left his hand there to touch the edge of it. All that music invisible from the outside.

“She must have told you I’ve never had a pack, I’ve--or I’ve, maybe mine threw me out,” Louis said. It was a fear he hadn’t vocalized until now. It wasn't a fear for the morning, it was a fear for nighttime, for the close hours of panicking leading up to the train tracks.  _What if there's something wrong that I can't even remember?_ People had reasons for doing things, even bad things. 

“She told me you’ve been on your own,” Steve countered, measured and nonreactive. “That you don’t remember ever having a pack, and this is the first one you’ve met. And your name is Louis, and you're good at board games and particular about tea, and,” Steve’s eyes crinkled again, that rush of warmth that Louis could just about put his hand out and feel, “And that you’ve already read all the books in the lounge, so I had to truck in here with several third and fourth items of book series that were very difficult to remember, especially given how much Harry was yelling gibberish titles into the phone while Gemma was yelling at him.”

Steve nodded toward the windowseat, where there was a backpack filled indeed with a book-shaped mound. Could wolves wear backpacks? So maybe he hadn’t walked in from town as a wolf. It was very nearly a distraction--nothing in the world filled Louis’ heart up with a leapfrog jolting joy like a fresh book--but Louis didn’t let it be.

“Ok. But none of that is acknowledging that I’m not the same as everyone here. Not the same as all the other wolves. All the other wolves that any of you have ever known about,” Louis said, with emphasis. He took the toast when Steve shoved it more insistently toward him, picked it up with the hand not touching the phone, and took a bite. It was hard to look self-assured and stubborn with his cheek accidentally sticking out like a chipmunk, but Louis resolutely told himself it was Harry’s fault for making the bread in the first place. Impossible to eat challah in reasonable bites.

“The rest,” Steve said with his own mouth full of the treacherously good egg bread, but in the practiced tone of somebody who’s had this kind of conversation before, and that was nice, because that made one of them. “The rest, why don’t you tell me?”

“I can’t change,” Louis said flatly. “I change at the full moon, but I guess, wolves are supposed to change whenever they want to. I can't transform into a wolf, I don't _know_ any of the weird instinct stuff they act like I'm supposed to know.”

“And,” he added, thinking on it, “And the wolf can get vicious.”

Louis paused, spread his hands out on the island table like it was going to help underscore this point. Talking about this felt scratchy and hoarse in his throat, like the wolf was trying to swallow the words, but Louis licked his bottom lip to clear away breadcrumbs and forced it out anyway. “I really think the wolf could hurt them.”

Steve was looking at him now, chewing toast and turning the small glass marmalade jar with his fingers. It was homemade, labeled in Harry's scrawl. Louis looked at the script. Harry liked to label things. Harry kept a box of glass jars underneath the kitchen island “just in case” life surprised him with an urgent need for a spontaneous jam-making session and he had to be prepared. Harry didn’t deserve to get hurt.

“They don't believe me, I don't think. They don't know how serious it is. Can you tell if my wolf is...too broken to be around them?” Louis asked.

There was a beat, long enough for Louis to let out his shaky breath and envision the train tracks again in his mind, on and on to another invisible station.

“Wolves can _usually_ change whenever they want to,” Steve corrected.

“What?” Louis blinked at him.

“Catch,” Steve said. He threw the jar without looking, a quick flip of his right hand shooting out from his body. It was so fast that Louis didn't have time to think, just blinked again and saw the jar in his own hand, three inches from his face, which was growling. Teeth bared, wolf up with a shiver. He was jolted up on the stool, his thigh muscles tensed and ready to go, his jaw clenched.

But it was only just a teeth-bare. Louis let his mouth relax, sank back on the stool, and put the jar on the island.

“What was that for?” he asked, bold enough to allow the irritation to float up to the surface. Steve didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed up and went to make another piece of toast for himself, this slice even thicker than the last.

“It’s an addiction, this challah,” Steve said mournfully.

“I can’t believe that someone as impossibly opaque as you is supposed to be the doctor,” Louis snapped. “Are you too used to telepathy, or _what_.” Three weeks ago he never would've dared. Even now it was a gamble, a pressure on the tentative social fabric between them and the promise that Harry and Gemma and everybody else kept making, to see if it would tear.

Steve only grinned over the island.

“There’s not really a _should_ , with your wolf,” Steve said, poking at the toaster with a fork to stuff the over-thick slice in. Hopefully he wasn’t going to electrocute himself. Louis was in no way prepared to explain that to everyone else when they woke up. “Why did I do that? Because, I wanted to test your reflexes. Because it's all right for you to express yourself. Because I wanted to see what would happen.”  
  
Louis blinked at him.

“Fine,” Louis said, surprising even himself, but bold again, bold like someone who could talk to strangers and pick his own music and wander around on an early morning and still feel warm. “Fine, examine me. You can….do your doctor thing.”

“I appreciate that,” Steve said with a wry, lopsided grin, “Because I already have.”

Louis blinked. “What?”

“Examined you,” Steve said. “What did you think this was?”

“Um, breakfast?” Louis scowled, and Steve only laughed, reminding Louis once again of that underestimated wolf.

“Here’s how I do things,” Steve said. “I’m going to tell you what I think, and that doesn’t mean it’s the ground truth. You tell me if you think I’m wrong, and we can have a conversation about it. Wolves know themselves best. They like to call me a doctor and I am, you know, but it’s complicated. You want to hear what I think about your wolf?”

“Yes,” said Louis, because suddenly, he really, really did.

Steve looked at the fork. He reminded Louis of a fortune teller, crossing his ankles and leaning into the cabinets, at ease with all of Louis’ future whirling and twisting in the air in front of him.

“You’ve listened to the same song a hundred and twenty-three times in a row. Good taste, by the way, I’ll send Harry some EDM for you. But perseverative music listening is a good sign, not a bad sign. It’s a sign of self-soothing, a pattern your wolf finds comforting. And your wolf letting itself do some soothing means that its guard is down, for once in your extremely disciplined life. Your wolf is probably expressive, yeah? And that annoys you, yeah?”

Louis made another irritated face, using his fingertips to shove the phone further down into his pajama pocket. But Steve must get that it was just a quick way to cover for the rush of relief mixed with discomfort. A stranger putting their finger on the crux of a conflict he'd always felt, in twenty minutes and with their mouth full, was just _surreal_. 

“I don’t know,” Louis said, “The wolf is fucking loud.”

“Sure,” Steve laughed. “Like I said. Unusually expressive. The wolf _is you,_ you know. Means some fundamental parts of you haven't been drowned out, even with no one to talk to. And you did that. You protected that, I'm guessing, and with what? With music and books and whatever else you could find and keep around you? Things that made your wolf feel like it could imagine _pack._ "

"Come on," Louis said, glowering into his folded arms now, because having this kind of thing put into words  _hurt_. "I didn't sign up for psychology." 

"No," Steve said softly, "But you've been awfully good at it anyway. A sensitive wolf, that’s something to treasure.”

Louis could see, with the clarity of a waking dream, the water-damaged wall of his old apartment and the fragile vase he'd picked out of the garbage one day, stuffed with daisies. There had been a thick red mug with a gold paint edge, piles of books from twenty-five-cent library sales and the generosity of neighbors with kids his age. Fragments that had made him feel like the beautiful parts of the world could still get through the cracks, even to his closed-off part of it.   
  
Louis stuffed toast into his mouth. Express _that_. Steve watched him for a moment, head tilted, and then nodded to himself.

“So. The mundane stuff, then. You’re lean, but that’s not surprising. I’m guessing you’ve eaten more to survive than anything else for the last few years. You’re could stand to eat a few more of Harry’s waffles. I recommend the cinnamon buttermilk recipe, personally.”

He leaned forward to tap the counter lightly, gesturing toward Louis’ hand.

“You haven’t got ridged nails, haven’t got paronychia, which means you aren’t trying to flex into wolf shape all the time without realizing. And that’s really good. And,” here Steve wrinkled his nose a little in what Louis recognized as a very wolfish apology-face, “Sorry, but you smell healthy. That’s a big thing. Your mouth is totally normal, teeth are human. You’re not stuck, which is the main thing I wanted to rule out.”

“You could smell my mouth? When I eat?” Louis realized, more impressed than anything. Steve shrugged, unabashed.

“I’m good,” he said simply. “And the big thing?”

Louis waited. Steve waited. Perhaps Steve was more dramatic than his self-effacing manner and wry humor suggested. Steve smiled at him, over the plates and the kitchen island. In the window, the sun was glinting over the snow in the sudden brightness of winter morning.

“Louis, I threw a jar at your face and you didn’t even come up off the stool toward me. Dangerous? Vicious? Come on. Your wolf is only dangerous when it makes complete sense to be dangerous. You’re not wrong. _It’s_ not broken.”

“I still can’t change into the wolf, I’m still not like them,” Louis said.

“I know,” Steve said. “And you’re still not sure what you think about being pack, and that’s ok. And you’re still three and a half weeks away from your only reality being that the only way to be a wolf was to wait for the moon to pull it out of you, and the very real fear that humans would be around when it happened. And you’re still not a lot of things. But there are things that you _are_.”

Louis couldn’t really look at him, couldn’t look at anybody, so he just looked out the window. At the snow, which had gone from blue-and pale shadows to shining in the sun. Snow seemed pure white but it refracted so many colors when you caught it at the right angle. He’d read, at some point very long ago, that white was every other color all mashed together, and he'd never before had anybody to share that thought with. 

“Pack, like a bunch of people. _Rapscallions_ ,” Louis said. He liked good words and strange descriptions and he wondered if somebody had told Steve, wondered at the notion that anyone might know a fact like it was  _this thing about Louis_ and share it. Pack like backpack, a backpack full of books, like people thinking that Louis should get to read the next book in a series.

Steve nodded. “Like a bundle. Hey, you know why a bundle of sticks gets better, every time you add another one?”

“Why?” Louis asked, breath catching in his throat, pressing his fingers into the mug of tea so hard that they turned white around the edges. He felt the heat right down to the bone.

Steve smiled again. “Because all together, they're too strong to break.”


	5. Chapter 5

**H**.

 

 _“_ Oh my god,” Louis whispered, clutching Harry's arm in tight, fierce fingers. Too excited to even notice he was doing it.

 _Harry_ wouldn’t have noticed if it had been anybody else, in the whirlwind of physicality that was living with three best friends and the ever-expanding circle of pack-family-friends-siblings. Harry, like any other homegrown wolf in an affectionately reckless pack, carried five or six bruises on the regular and couldn’t ever say where they came from, Liam’s accidental foot or Niall’s movie night elbow or (more rarely) even Zayn, probably flailing away from something.

But from Louis? Nah, that, Harry noticed. Harry upgraded his assessment of this outing from a really excellent idea to the best idea he'd ever had, about anything.

“Surpriiiiise,” he announced. Maybe a touch too grandly, because there was the hitting laughter pulse that Harry had started to recognize as meaning _Harry_ rippling through Louis’ thoughts, _always such a drama_ \--before it cut out in a static of excitement and then a pile-up train of half-articulated half-joking thoughts. _Sit here forever probably. Gemma won’t like that. Niall could distract her. Zayn claims a peanut butter and nutella sandwich is good for two weeks and I’ve got one in my bag --_

“SO,” Harry said, tamping down on his mental snooping with a firm internal hand, “So, this is our library. We can get you set up with a card. You know, since you have an address now, and everything. I mean everybody knows the inn, but. But I brought in a picture of our heating bill on my phone, just in case. So you’ve got proof of residence _._ ”  

If Harry’s wolf had been capable, it would’ve been rolling its eyes. 

“Wow,” Louis said, looking around the library with full sincerity, oblivious to the hysterics going on behind his head.

Harry smiled at him helplessly. Louis was looking delightfully sharp in a cranberry-red pullover and jeans that Zayn had drawn on in the car on the way to town, black sharpie hatch marks and a star. Louis had let him, very patiently. They had been piled together in the backseat with Liam and Niall in the truck behind. Louis returned the favor by drawing an intricate sharpie tattoo on Zayn's forearm, his thin eyebrows furrowed, working out a pattern in wet ink.

It was so goddamn good. Harry wanted to pull Louis aside and ask him if he noticed just how good, if he realized. Louis had stopped contradicting every mention of the inn as _home,_ every mention of _pack._

Harry was trying to not be overprotective and snoop through the tangles of Louis’ telepathy. Surely that was what counted. It was but a few more nights to the full moon, after which Louis would feel how much he belonged, and then he’d finally promise to stay for _real_ for real, and Harry could tell him about the strange leaking telepathy but in a casual way that wouldn't worry anyone. Like afterward, in flannel pajamas and the firelit lounge with Louis’ head on his shoulder, when all uniqueness could seem more like being special _._  

Something like that. It was fine.

Steve had basically given Gemma instructions to stop worrying and then, when Harry decided that didn’t apply to him, cut Harry’s queries off with an edge that they rarely saw from Steve. It was _fine._

 _“_ I wouldn’t advise trying to camp here overnight, you know they do let you check things out, don’t you?” Harry could nearly feel Louis smile, a wide pull through his normally tight mouth, striking and glorious for that.

“Hope there’s a high limit. I’m a fast reader,” Louis said, “You don’t even know how fast.”

“Yeah, yeah, lord it over the mortals,” Harry sniffed. “I’ve spent more of my life colorblind as a wolf, compared to you. It’s an unfair comparison.”

“Even other wolves don’t take forty-five minutes to read a recipe,” Louis said. Smile growing into a grin.

“It required research,” Harry protested. “It required learning how to brown butter, and balancing baking powder and soda—”

He was interrupted by the peal of Louis’ laughter, and Harry grinned. It felt, almost, like floating.

Louis had let go of Harry’s arm too fast and curled his fingers up into a small, self-conscious fist, but he was bouncing from one foot to the other. The village library had a grand total of three people in it counting them and the one librarian, perched on a stool behind a self-checkout kiosk and reading The Martian with an air of dutiful fatigue.

“How about I point you to the cooking section and you can drawl your explanations to the books there,” Louis said. 

“You’re a menace,” Harry, said snapping his teeth for emphasis. Louis clacked teeth back. 

“Nice, getting more forest by the day,” Harry said with satisfaction before he could stop himself, and Louis rolled his eyes. _Feral,_ his telepathy supplied. God, but Harry's wolf wanted to barrel into Louis’ shoulder and flank him in a run until they tumbled into the ground. Harry dug his thumbnail into the side of his middle finger.

Louis’ telepathy was changing day by day, quieter as he got more vocal, muted but rich with happiness when Harry could catch it, and it was terrible, intoxicating, something he kept wanting to lean into. Especially since Steve had come--there was something altogether different in Louis. Like the bated breath certainty of a coming season change. 

All morning Louis had been clever and funny and maybe even flirtatious, although he kept doing things like what he was doing now: biting back the way he wanted to smile at Harry, and keeping his eyes religiously toward the books even though Harry could feel an outline in his mind, Harry’s own big hands and his shoulders which were, apparently, also rather something to look at. It was revelatory, all the lines Harry had never imagined from the inside.  

 _“_ There's a decent amount of scifi,” Harry said, superfluously, because it was half robots and spaceships and explorers in here. It had been the pack kids’ library for three generations. It was a treasure trove.

“There’s a decent amount of shelf space in our kitchen,” Louis said, calculatedly, “By the fridge, where you put all those pots you never use.”

Harry made an affronted noise, but Louis was already walking away.

“Tell Gemma I appreciated everything,” Louis said. “But she will never see me again. I am now Book Wolf, Eater of Worlds. Turn into a shelving cart on the full moon. Very dangerous, wobbly on the wheels.”

“And people say I’m the weird one,” Harry said.

Louis was already walking away with his book-walk, all determination, by the time Harry realized it was the first flippant joke Louis had ever made about being _wolf_. And he was laughing, pealing out and louder than Harry had ever heard him, delighted at himself and Harry and the universe.   

The librarian, with that magical acuity for social circumstance that distinguished the vocation, only looked up to smile.

_***_

**L.**

“Give me that,” Gemma said. She said it from behind Louis but before startling him, a thoughtfulness. He noticed that she stepped heavier around him, moved slower. 

Louis frowned at her over three reusable fabric book bags. The bags had pictures of books doing various unlikely activities, like fishing on a bridge over a creek, but Harry had picked them up at the counter and insisted on it, even though Louis had rather thought he could get away with carrying the books across the street to the car. Harry had probably been right, and anyway the fabric bags were delightful, made of thick tan canvas and durable.

Louis was slowly learning to not think of everything as a stop before leaving, but, still. It was nice to have means to carry things.

“Oh ye of little faith,” Gemma said, laughing. She took a book bag and tucked it expertly in the tiny trunk of her red car, rearranging the paraphernalia that had collected itself around the spare tire, and somehow fitting the other two bags in around roller skates, a pullup bar for Liam, and a very large tin of tea.

“Talent,” Louis said. Gemma looked pleased.

“Now as long as Harry doesn’t buy you something goddamn ridiculous, we should actually make it back to the inn with your thousand new series,” she said. 

“Five series, the rest are stand alone. And he won’t,” Louis said, flushing.

“Oh well, an afternoon in town, the sun's out, the moon is coming, he’ll want to impress you,” Gemma said. And she winked. “Don’t let it go to your head. I’m sure that’s a problem.” 

“It’s fine,” Louis said. He was pretty sure Gemma was teasing, with her poking fingers that tapped him lightly on the shoulder but didn’t linger. He was enjoying it, really. It was a warm day for the winter, the sun crackling through the ice in the branches of the trees, sounds carrying around the quaint wooden buildings of the small main street. Steve was still around and Louis had had tea with him and learned some enlightening things about transformation. The moon was coming, but Louis wasn’t so scared. 

“What’s yours?” Louis asked. Gemma had a book of her own tucked under an arm, not from the library but from the post office, poking out from a padded envelope.

 “It’s, ah,” Gemma said, consideringly.

She pulled the book out of the packaging. It was a stiff gleaming paperback with rough cut pages, limited print small press, like the pile of beekeeping books that Louis had once found (ok, stolen) from an abandoned shed on a very long morning after a full moon. He'd thought he wouldn't ever look at them but he'd taken them anyway, the way that people without things, take things. But he'd read them cover to cover.

On Gemma's book, there was a cheesy stock image cover of two people sitting at a table. But it looked nice, a man and a woman smiling at each other with hands touching, like they were in the middle of a conversation. There was a university logo on it, and the title was _Understanding Adult Healing from Disrupted Attachment._

“Huh,” Louis said.

“It’s not, well,” Gemma said, and Gemma wasn’t usually like this, hesitant and groping for the right words, but Louis knew what this was like so he just waited quietly, trying to radiate what she always seemed to radiate for him. Patience and the space to find the words. 

“I don’t want you to feel like this is, like anyone’s thinking anything wrong of you. It’s not that. It’s not even--the humans, you know, they don’t have anything like a pack, it’s not like a diagnosis. But it is like...I thought. Well. Steve agreed, and I thought it might be helpful. I _wanted,_ just to learn more. It doesn’t mean it all _fits_ what you’ve been through, you know, the human labels? But Steve thought it still might be useful. Understanding other people, who didn’t have something like the inn, like us, like the pack,”

“People who were alone,” Louis said softly. It didn’t feel so much like the sharp, difficult disclosure that it might have only a week ago. After the morning talks with Steve it felt known, like the shape of it was something tractable under his fingers. Sad but from a distance, a conquerable distance. “It's true though. It's not something that just goes away.”

Gemma nodded, looking relieved. “I ordered it for me, so I know better. So I know more. So I could keep learning. So you don’t feel, you know, like you have to teach all of us, everything.”

“Oh,” Louis said. “No, hey, it’s ok. It's true that I'm...weird. A weird wolf.”

“But good,” Gemma said. Louis looked down at his boots and the wolf was thick in his chest but on the other hand he _wanted,_ and everything else was like a fairy tale so why not this?

“Ok,” he said, looking back up, agreeing. “But good.” 

“Louis,” Gemma said softly, “I may be lead, but you're in charge of you whether you join us or not. Things like this more than anything, you get to tell me what helps or not.”

Gemma's cheeks and eartips had gone red, but still holding out the book like Louis had the power here to give her permission for it or take it away, and Louis thought suddenly about how very brave that was, how much Gemma always seemed determined to be here, standing in the slush with him, giving him the reins.

The pack was their whole world, and she and Harry had always lived here, like this. They didn't know what it was to be a wolf without the woods, to wait for the turning of every month and wonder if it would strip all the safety out of their lives. They’d always had _each other._ And that, for some reason, was an ache that Louis could choke on.

But Gemma never looked away when he made eye contact, her wide eyes warm and sincere.

“I get it. I don't mind you reading things like that,” Louis said. He nodded, and looked at the packed trunk. Room for at least another book in there, probably. “Obviously there’d be some useful books. I’m just, it’s nice that you told me.” 

“Obviously,” Gemma echoed. “I just wanted you to know. Not like a secret, but also, not like a burden. Whatever you want to ask about, I want you to know. But you don’t have to solve anything for me, or anybody. I really want you to know--that we’re all gonna try. That it’s not all on you.”

“Ok,” Louis said.

She tucked the book away and Louis let out his breath, felt release in the thick middle of his chest. It was a sunny day, and he could see the boys down the street, Niall waving something in his direction. Liam and Zayn were studiously ignoring each other from opposite sides of the street, and Harry was waiting for him.

“I’ll see you?” Louis said.

“Two hours _sharp,”_ Gemma said, sounding like a pack lead again.  

“Better make it two and a half,” Louis said. “I’ve been told I’m being introduced to darts at the bar, and I can only imagine how long those point disputes will take.” 

“Oh cheeky, go on, get outta here,” Gemma moved in a wolfish lunge, a pseudo-snap that would’ve been a shove in wolf form. Louis jumped back hard enough that he slipped on the slush. But faster than Gemma could react, Louis dipped down to grab a piece of melting snow and flung it at her. He twisted away and ran toward the boys, Gemma’s outraged, happy yell echoing behind him.

***

“Lou my boo, tell me, what is the joy of a new lamp?” Niall asked.

Louis looked at Niall through an antique cabinet of glassware.  

“Not to be underestimated?” Louis ventured. Niall beamed and shoved a lamp into Louis’ arms, blocking his view of the entire shop because the lampshade--pink and gold, sequins sewn onto the canvas and dangerously close to Louis’ eye--was huge. 

The lamp was ceramic, with a shiny white base shaped like a unicorn, complete with mane and forelock and nostrils. The lightbulb sat on top of the unicorn’s head, and it had pink inlay on the eyes, which gleamed oddly but gently in the window-lit shop. 

“Do you like it?” Niall said, and then, without waiting for an answer, “There’s a whole set. Three unicorns, except I think one of them is a mystical llama with a horn. So two unicorns and a friend. Let’s get all of them.”

“I like it,” Louis decided, even though it seemed the unicorn was looking at him and its gaze was suspicious and even hostile. Louis liked its chubby, glowering face. 

“I see we’re making good progress on decorating Louis’ room,” Zayn said, wandering back from browsing fruitlessly through a VHS bin. 

“You _doubt me?_ ” Niall said.

Zayn shook an antique door handle in his direction. “I would never, it’s just that you packborns always have the absolute shit taste,” he said, sagely. “It's all the twigs,” he said to Louis, and Louis snickered.

“Wellllll,” Niall said, glancing out in the general direction of Harry, who was leaned over the counter examining a fake crystal set of chess pieces and a gigantic cross-stitch hoop in vague, mud-green colors. “Well.” 

Louis put the unicorn lamp in the pile of stuff on the middle table. They were doing something that Harry called thrifting and Louis would’ve probably just called _shopping,_ seeing as buying used things for the lowest price point was only rational. But it was making everybody so happy, and Louis felt that to the tips of his toes, a relaxed and silly kind of happy, an unexpected feeling.

“Can we find a sword?” Niall asked. “Did Gemma have any stupid rules about weaponry? Hey Lou, you want a sword right?” 

“Why not?” Louis said, grinning at the unicorn lamp, possibly drunk on the power of an ambiguously defined interior furnishing budget. Why not absolutely everything?

“Her only rule was _don't let Niall make all the decisions,”_ Zayn yelled, putting Niall in a sudden headlock that made the shopkeeper swivel around and make despairing motions away from all the glassware.

“Swords would be special order from the city. But we've got a guy if you need it,” said a strange male voice from Louis’ left side. Louis swiveled. 

Louis’ forest-sharpened instincts sent him a collage of immediate evaluation: gentleness, so not a threat, but a scratchy downturn to the voice that sent a message like coming out from the brush on the edge of the territory. Friendly, scruffy, complicated, a guy wearing a layer of cable sweater despite the warm day and standing a considered few feet away. He had a head tilt to the side and his hands casually visible, and relaxed. 

Louis had the  impression that he’d been, just a little bit, stalked. The wolf was awake, like a keen thing pressing its snout between the ribs of Louis’ human torso, ears forward. It was edge space, like the crackling fields between two forests, the pull at the edge of the territory that Louis had already started to settle into. The stranger radiated a lot of the things that felt wolf but one thing was _elsewhere,_ his tilted head in a curious, interrogating gesture. Invitation, maybe.

 _Down, boy,_ Louis thought firmly. Harry twitched at the counter, knocking a chess piece to the ground. 

“Eastern pack, huh?” Louis said, after a beat. And the stranger grinned.

“Thought you'd be sharp. And you’re the new one, I’ve been looking for you,” the guy said easily.

He didn’t reach out a hand to shake. After all, wolves didn’t. Not the pack leads, anyway.

“I’m Ed. Grab a drink?”

 

***

  
**H.**  


Harry chewed morosely on the corner of a cardboard coaster. The weather had changed as quickly as his mood: a vicious downpour had come upon the town like a kick from winter, and they'd had to run from the thrift store to the bar. 

 _They_ being his pack, but also _Ed,_ hipster-ass pre-law student at the local city university who played guitar on the side and was somehow _east pack lead,_ currently squirreled into a corner booth with Louis and chatting. And may curses rain down on his head like the ice water that was sliding down the windows. 

“You're gonna catch something nasty from that,” Niall said, observationally.

Harry spit out a tiny bit of cardboard. “I’d be immune by now, even if that were possible,” he snapped. They’ve only been coming to the _Swigging Squirrel_ since Harry was in diapers and slung over Anne’s arm or getting passed around to tolerant pack members while Anne kicked everybody’s ass at pool.

Niall looked at Liam expectantly, but Liam was occupied trying to edge out as far as possible from the corner booth without actually falling out, because Zayn was in between him and Harry. Niall sighed. 

“I have to do everything around here,” he complained. 

“What?” Harry said blankly. Zayn said nothing, and Liam said nothing about the fact that Zayn said nothing. They were _intolerable,_ the whole lot of them.

Niall grabbed Harry’s ear.

“ _Hey,”_ Harry snarled.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Niall said, in his passable Liam-imitation voice.

“I’ll throw you in the pond,” Harry said, threatening tone perhaps mitigated by the stray bit of saliva-damp coaster pieces falling out while he said it. Niall moved to ruffle Harry’s hair.

“Please keep a hold on your jealousy and stop eating the inanimate objects,” he said. 

“I’m not _jealous,”_ Harry huffed.  

“Louis is fine,” Niall said, “He's lived his whole life without your protection and Steve was very clear on the fact that he should meet all the packs.” 

Harry’s wolf was going to shove Niall into the pond come the full moon, and Niall looked like he knew it.

“You’ve got a strong immune system but I can’t speak for what the coasters will do to your gum health,” Liam interrupted, coming to life at the barest hint of an opening for a medical hypothesis. “Maybe we could ask Steve--”

“He’s got to have the chance to at least meet the other packs,” Zayn said unexpectedly, staring into his hot chocolate.

“ _Meet,”_ Harry said, “Not be _kidnapped by._ Do you think he’s all right? I don’t know if he’s all right. I should go over there.”

Louis was laughing at something Ed said. Ed had his phone out, probably showing pictures. The eastern pack was big, bigger than their beautiful and _perfectly_ sized little small town pack. Louis’ telepathy wasn’t even twitching when the wind rocked the sign outside the door. It was all bright, quick, and inquisitive. The eastern pack had a party every full moon where they did dumb stupid shit like climb up the side of their reservoir canyon and dare each other to swim to the other side. Ed was telling stories about it, because Harry felt it in Louis’ telepathy, that running little twitch in his mind thinking things like _I bet I could do that._

Harry tried to subtly move to the end of the booth and crane around it to see them better, and Niall threw a coaster at him.

“Go wolf out and run around in the woods if you need to,” Niall said.

“I hate you, every last one. I am going to go _live_ in the woods,” Harry announced, slumping out dramatically on the table and dropping his chin into his arms.

“That’s too bad,” Louis said, soft and sweet from his side. “I thought you were gonna teach me to play darts.”

Harry jolted upright. Louis had a beer bottle and a dart tucked behind his ear, and his mind was _laughing at Harry,_ a continual quicksand mix of embarrassment and delight that Harry seemed to keep finding himself in. He felt the entire back of his neck go hot.  

 _So much drama,_ Louis thought gaily.

“Well, ah,” Harry said.

Louis batted him, very lightly, on the forearm. It took Harry another embarrassingly long moment before he realized that Louis was nudging him to move over. He did so, and Louis slid into the booth, right into Harry’s side. He smelled like the faint woodish smell of the bar, but also like the rain, and the line of his thigh was wet with it, sharpie design melting into the denim. 

"How are my lamps?" Louis asked.   
  
"Safe," Harry managed to get out, because they were, wrapped up in loads of tissue paper and sitting proudly on a chair next to the booth.   
  
"Well then," Louis said. 

“How’s Ed?” Liam asked.

“Yes, how are those _easterners_?” Zayn said, pointed in his stupid _fighting-with-Liam_ tone, and Liam didn’t look at him. 

“We support you in every way,” Niall said loudly, seizing the remaining coaster and pulling it firmly away from Harry. “Even if you make the miserably terrible decision to go visit the easterners. By the way, they cheat at board games, they’re terrible tippers, they swallow their gum, and they smell bad. Known facts.”

Louis laughed and Harry could _feel it,_ could feel the shift in his thin shoulder, pressing gently but unhesitatingly into Harry’s upper arm.

“I don’t doubt it,” Louis said, “Sounds like they throw a good party though. We could do a party, right? Could be fun. Ed tells me the packs go way back.”  

 _Meeting more wolves, sounds fun,_ Louis was thinking, and it wasn’t a thought of fear or hesitation or overwhelm. It was a feeling like running up the rise of a hill to find a good view, like stretching out your legs on the first long run. Getting the lay of the land, _exploring_  

And more than anything in the world, Harry thought, Louis deserved that kind of feeling. Harry bit his lip, and sent his stupid, immature wolf to sit in the furthest corner of his interior woods.

“You could absolutely do a party,” he said. “They’d be lucky to meet you.”

Louis smiled at him. It was never not going to be gorgeous, wasn’t it?

“Yeah well, that’s what I said. Figured our pack should represent,” Louis said, settling back in the booth, still lightly against Harry, a quiet, unselfconscious pressure.  
  
Like the way the wolves came back and checked in after exploring, Harry realized. Out and around and free, and then back into _pack._ And if  _that_ wasn't the most gorgeous thing he'd ever felt, what on earth was?   
  
"What the hell happened to the  _coasters?"_ Louis asked.


End file.
